It becomes more necessary to have your website translated into other languages in a world that gets more global every day. Without doing so, you are missing out on potential revenue, going straight to your competition.

But translating a website is not an easy task, especially if you want to enable a whole team to work on it.

We aim to make this easier for you by explaining the do's and don'ts of Search-Engine-Optimizations when it comes to multilingual content. And last but not least, we show you how Dilingual can help you achieve this in seconds.

Offer users a language choice.

You may assume that the best action would be to redirect users to their preferred language automatically. Either by detecting the browser language (for the technical audience: Accept-Language header) or detecting their location (using the user's IP address).

While this may be helpful in some cases, you are risking two huge downsides here:

• Search Engines may not be able to discover your translated content. Resulting in you being heavily penalized in search results.
• Website visitors may be traveling and have an IP from a foreign country.

Instead of forcing your website visitor upon a language, you should instead give them a choice. Implement a selector where users can select their preferred language. You can even consider making this prominently visible on the first visit.

Lesson learned: Do not automatically redirect website visitors to a translated version.

Make your translated content accessible for search engines.

If you want your translated website to appear in search engine results on Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo, you need to take some steps to ensure this.

First of all, use different URLs for your translated content. You could, for example, serve your content on a separate subdomain or a subfolder. However, do not use the same URL as this will result in search engines not index your content.

Secondly, instruct the search engine crawlers where to find translated versions of your website. There are several ways to do this, such as specific HTML tags (e.g., link rel="alternate"), HTTP headers, or a sitemap. While you do not need to implement all of these discovery methods, you must add at least one of them to your website.

Lesson learned: Make sure Search Engines can index your translated website version; this may require code changes to your website.

Dilingual can do this all for you.

Does this sound quite complex for you? No worries at all, Dilingual allows you to translate your website quickly without any coding changes required on your end.

Dilingual will also automatically optimize your website for SEO purposes. You can learn more about Dilingual by clicking here.