Now You Have Your Website Translated

Posted by Nicole on 2011-05-13

Now you already translated your website into Chinese, what is the next step for your Chinese SEO?

My suggestion is to let a Chinese SEO look at it, why?

1. The Chinese “keywords” may not be really your keywords:

Is this how you did it: you sent your Chinese translator the English keyword list and your translator returned a list that contained the Chinese equivalents of your English keywords?

If so, I have to say your assumption is wrong.

Because for every English word or phrase, there may be more than one Chinese translation, and your Chinese translator has no idea which of them are the ones people search.

2. The information architecture of your site:

A translator’s job is to convert your English site into Chinese, that is all. As for SEO factors such as if the target keyword appears at the right place, term frequency, HTML tags, etc, they are not and are should not be their concerns, let alone higher SEO concerns such as semantic relevance, topical models, and LSI.

3. And the anchor text

This may be another mistake caused by wrong keywords. We all know anchor text is import in terms of internal link juice. To let the target page receive the best amount of weight, we have to use proper anchor text. If your translator doesn’t know this, hmmm, you know your SEO efforts will be harmed.

Although some translators claim their translation services are SEO-minded, using them can be dangerous. I have met some guys in the translation industry telling me they know SEO stuff, and in the end presented me a web page whose density of the exact target phrase was as high as 20%…

So here is some takeaways for you, if you are planning to have your site translated and do SEO for it:

1. Always resort to the SEO company first to see if they can help you with the localization needs;
2. If they can’t, at least let them give you the real Chinese keyword list first before you find a translator.

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