To present search results, Google searches the web with automated programs called web crawlers, before analysing and indexing the pages it has learnt about by crawling. The internet is overloaded with information that needs to be sorted in some way if anyone is to find what they are looking for. Google relies on algorithm ranking systems based on many factors, including the keywords used in a search, the relevance and usefulness of a page, the expertise of sources and the user’s location and settings.
Apart from looking at relevant words in the title, body text and metadata (see below), the systems also analyse text based on its quality, difficulty in consideration of the target audience, readability and usability. By considering these factors in your writing, you can improve a website’s ranking and boost its visibility in search results.
So how do I do SEO?
As a general rule of thumb, Google looks favourably on websites that have been designed with their users in mind. That means providing a short and informative summary of the site content on the homepage and keeping the URL structure clear, for instance. Most importantly of all, though, you need to include relevant keywords and produce high-quality content.
Keywords are the words and phrases that people might use to search for and find your website. You should settle on one or two keywords for every page on your website and then include them in the main copy and the meta title. Make sure that you use different keywords for each page of your website to avoid forcing your pages to compete with each other.
It’s important that keywords always fit in with the website’s content. Using keywords solely on the basis that they are probably often used in searches won’t achieve much. And nor will repeating keywords over and over again in an attempt to improve the ranking.
Like the keywords, the content also needs to be relevant and give the user added value. High-quality copy encourages people to spend longer looking at a website – another factor that determines the Google ranking. If you craft good copy, it’s also more likely that other websites will link to yours and that can only be good news for your ranking.
SEO in the world’s languages
English may be the language of the internet, but only 30% of web users actually speak it as their first language. Businesses looking to target an international customer base need to create a multilingual website and that means they need to think about SEO in more than one language. It’s no surprise that the demand for SEO-optimised language services is growing fast.
Have you ever thought about the fact that website localisation and multilingual SEO go hand in hand? Unfortunately, what we’re seeing all too often is website copy simply being pasted into a Word or Excel document and run through a CAT tool like any other text for translation. Sure, this method produces lots of lovely multilingual websites. But if those websites don’t feature the right keywords for the target market, they won’t appear on SERPs (search engine results pages) and the world won’t even know they exist.
Localising keywords
As more and more customers are getting wise to the fact that they need to think about SEO, we are seeing more and more requests for keywords to be localised as part of website translation projects. The first step is to translate the keywords literally into the target language. We can then check the search volume of the translated keywords using a free tool called Keyword Surfer. This browser extension shows the search volume directly in the Google search bar. So now we can search for the translated keywords and check their search volume for the Swiss market (you can select the country settings in the tool):
