The Localization Roundup (2021-04-02)

Welcome to another Localization Roundup, a collection of some of the best articles about website and software localization from across the Internet. Here are the articles we found this week:

Google vs Baidu: Key Differences in SEO Strategy

If you want to get your website to show up in search results on the Chinese Internet, you have to know how to do SEO for the Baidu search engine. While Google is the main search engine around much of the world, in China it is used in less than 2% of the searches. Baidu, on the other hand, is used in 78.4% of web searches.

SEO for Google may have become second nature for you, but you need to realize that Baidu is very different from Google. That means you should adjust your SEO strategy for the Chinese market in order to rank on Baidu.

Some differences include:

• Baidu doesn’t rely on AI for image searches as much as Google does. Therefore, you need to focus on optimizing those alt tags.
• Meta keywords are still important for Baidu.
• Baidu doesn’t really excel at crawling JavaScript, so you need to make sure your important content is in the HTML.

This articles explains how you can adapt your SEO practices to get top rankings on Baidu.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-vs-baidu-seo-strategy/399717/

How to Target Multiple Language Audiences in One Country

What should you do if you want your website to reach speakers of various languages within a single country? It might seem like you should do the same as if you want to reach people in other countries, but actually there are nuances you should pay attention to beyond just translating into a foreign language.

For one, you can use href tags to indicate not only the language but also the geography you want to target. For example, you should use “ja-jp” to target Japanese speakers in Japan and “en-jp” to target English speakers in Japan.

Further, you should pay attention to the type of language spoken in various regions and use the correct type for the region you are targeting. For example, Canadian French is different from European French, and Spanish spoken in the USA is different from the Spanish spoken in Spain.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/international-seo-strategy-nondominant-language/399800/

How to Create Marketing And Website Content Fit For Translation

If you are going to be creating content that will later be translated into another language or into multiple languages, there are lots of tips to follow that can save you money and make your life easier. For example, local expressions and clichés are often very difficult to translate and can often be misunderstood and mistranslated by the translator, so avoiding them in the source text is a good best practice.

This detailed article goes through a variety of tips that will make your life easier when you go to translate your content.

https://customerthink.com/how-to-create-marketing-and-website-content-fit-for-translation/

That’s our roundup for this week. Leave a comment below to share any great localization or translation articles you have read lately.