I have a project that I'm working on where the main goal was to deliver SEO options and advice. I think it's coming along nicely, and the scope has greatly expanded.

Now it turns out the site isn't going to be just for the English speaking world, but also for German, Chinese, Japanese, and possible other languages. As if programming this localization wasn't complicated enough, not I have to try and figure out the best way to approach SEO from a multiple language standpoint.

Has anyone had expirence with this at all? Any tips or information that would help me out? Should I just stick with the usual inbound linking strategy, just with different language sites?

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Hi,

I run sites in English, German, Russian, and Turkish.

There are some issues, such as the importance of putting them on the same domain, the difficulty in finding reliable backlinks in Russian and Turkish, and cross-linking pages.

Which languages are you planning to work in?

Cheers,
Paz.

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10.3 million entries for Hotels in Turkey but I'm still chipping away.

I'm mostly just the developer and SEO reference. I won't be adding any content, at least not to anything other than the english site. I may do some inbound link work for the english site, but the rest of the languages will be handled by someone else.

They already have the domains registered, and in fact the sites are already doing OK because they have been around for a while and are traded on the NASDAQ. I'm just looking for some general tips for the different languages and if I should change my strategy.

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Hi,

Well multi-language sites are a bit different to regular sites.

I use two meta tags that are important eg:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<meta http-equiv="CONTENT-LANGUAGE" content="EN">

For an english site, I would normally never bother with the second, and I prefer 8859-1 to UTF-8 because I want to emphasize my presence in the european SE's rather than the US ones.

Also I prefer to have one site with www.example.com/eng and www.example.com/de etc. to www.example.com and www.example.de etc.

Can't think of anything else at the moment!

Cheers,
Paz.

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10.3 million entries for Hotels in Turkey but I'm still chipping away.

So you think it's better to use the countries default character set rather than using unicode?

The site's designed around UTF-8 so I can store all the different languages in the same database. But I guess I can have it render in any charset.

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Hi,

UTF is a far superior character set and is the future of the web.

I just find that I am indexed more consistently in english, german, turkish, and russian (and therefore rank better) when I use the 8859-X charset, where X=1,5,9.

Which languages are you taking on?

Cheers,
Paz.

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10.3 million entries for Hotels in Turkey but I'm still chipping away.

To start out with, English, Chinese, Japanese, and German. It might expand to other languages in the future, but those are going to happen in the near term.

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AJAX Example Sites is now here! With a nice
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Hi,

well I have no experience of SEO for japanese and chinese sites, but of course they will certainly have to be utf-8.

Cheers,
Paz.

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10.3 million entries for Hotels in Turkey but I'm still chipping away.

So... will it help me in ranking my UK based website???

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Nope!

A eng charset meta tag won't help you rank for an english site in google.com or .co.uk!

I do have some evidence that they can help you rank for english language searches, in "foreign" versions of Google. They certainly help you get you pages with different languages indexed more consistently.

Cheers,
Paz.

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10.3 million entries for Hotels in Turkey but I'm still chipping away.