It may be commonplace, but the content of a website is one of the key factors in any SEO strategy on the web for export. It is essential to ensure that your content is of interest to your foreign customers and that it is preferable by the search engines. To score points in an increasingly competitive digital world, your web content must be optimized, technically and culturally.
To be well referenced with Google and other search engines, it is essential to produce relevant content for your potential customers, in each of the countries you are targeting. A successful international SEO campaign involves creating and publishing optimized content on your website, but also on other sites and platforms, and in different forms (blog posts, infographics, case studies, practical guides, videos, etc.). And the best way to create the most relevant content is to focus on a specific type of subject.
To be well referenced with Google and other search engines, it is essential to produce relevant content for your potential customers, in each of the countries you are targeting. A successful international SEO campaign involves creating and publishing optimized content on your website, but also on other sites and platforms, and in different forms (blog posts, infographics, case studies, practical guides, videos, etc.).
Optimized content
Content marketing is often managed independently of SEO, and it is all too common to find that published content is not optimized for SEO. In particular, it will be necessary to use the keywords well, and ensure their use in the pages of the site, at the level of the strategic elements of the content of the web page (title tags, meta tags, internal links, alt image texts, URLs, shaping). The keywords are sort of the backbone of your content, and the list of topics covered by your site should match the keywords you target in the country of your interest. However, the use of keywords should not be excessive either, and misuse can be penalized with Google. If the content is focused on a specific theme, then the keywords will naturally flow from this content.
Quality content
A high-performance multilingual website will have to offer quality content. This substantial content will have to meet the informative expectations of potential customers of the targeted market (s), the objective being to encourage Internet users to share and redistribute this quality information that you offer them. To ensure that your website has the greatest possible impact on the export markets you target, the content must be written by a native professional.
When we set up a content strategy for a multilingual website, we take into account the following points:
- Do the pages of the site offer substantial content? There is no hard and fast rule as to how much content a page should offer, but pages with substantial content will have to be offered, according to a recent study, the content with more than 1000 words worked better.
- Is the content valued by the target audience? Does it meet its expectations and needs? This is obviously a subjective question, but you can get an idea by looking at indicators such as bounce rate and time spent on the page.
- Does the content contain targeted but varied keywords? Do they appear in the first paragraphs? If you wish to obtain a referencing for a given keyword, it will invariably have to include them in the content of the page.
- Is the content likely to be considered spam (for example, is the keyword density too high)?
- Is the content correctly translated, without spelling and grammatical errors? A multilingual website is not professionally credible if its content contains grammatical errors.
- Is multilingual content easily readable by readers and search engines?
- Is the website really multilingual? Are titles, metadata, URLs, alt image texts localized in each of the target languages?
During the international content optimization phase, we carefully evaluate these different points:
Title tags
The title tags are correctly written and unique for each page of the multilingual website, and this in each of the languages.
The title tags are of great importance, and we will take care of their writing, taking care to include the relevant keywords.
Always use keywords searched by Internet users rather than putting the name of your company at the beginning of the title, even if it is very well known. Ideally, the title tag should contain between 50 and 60 characters.
Insufficient or missing page titles
Title tags must be unique. When optimizing the content, a list of pages with insufficient or incomplete title tags is created so that they can be rewritten. To do this, tools such as SEO Frog or Google Webmaster Tools tell us which title tags to work on.
Title of duplicate pages
The title tag audit also allows you to find duplicate tags. It will be necessary to rewrite them because duplicate titles can penalize the SEO effort.
Meta descriptions
The meta description should be written as advertising text. This is the text that appears under the title in search engine results pages. A good meta description will improve your click-through rate (CTR), which means that your page will be more often clicked in the search engine results.
We make sure to write a text perfectly describing the content of the web page, while highlighting the salient points of your proposal, with an effective “call to action”. It is demanding work that is a profitable investment. Generally, meta description tags should not exceed 160 characters.
Alt tags for incomplete or missing images
In addition to presenting certain advantages in terms of accessibility, image alt tags are important elements to take into account for international referencing. They play an important role in optimizing images because these tags are analyzed by the engines which index them for the corresponding themes.
If you offer products on your site, it will be necessary to ensure that the relevant keywords are used to describe the images in order to ensure better referencing of the site internationally.
Writing H tags
These are the tags designating the titles of the pages of a website. The header tags go from h1 to h6, the h1 tag being the most important. To optimize SEO, the texts to be inserted must have meaning and be treated to have an impact on search engines. A simple series of keywords will be useless. During the optimization, we look for and complete the missing H tags in each of the languages of the site. Ideally, the main title of the page should be an H1 and the subtitles in H2.
URLs
We make sure that URLs are correctly localized and translated, and that they describe the content on the site. URLs should not be too long, with good use of keywords for each of the target languages.
Keyword mapping and cannibalization
One of the objectives of content optimization is to limit the multiple uses of the same keyword on different pages of the site. There is indeed a risk of cannibalization of keywords which is not optimal:
- Possible confusion if we let the search engines decide which page should appear for such a request.
- SEO opportunities lost for the site whose SEO could be improved in some cases by targeting other keywords
A good keyword mapping can help solve this problem.
Duplicate content
A website has a problem of duplicate content when several pages offer the same content or almost identical content. Unfortunately, these pages can be both internal to the site and or be located on other websites (the pages are then hosted on a different domain).
We identify duplicate content on internal pages as well as externally and take effective measures to remedy this inconvenience and prevent the site from being penalized.
Substantial content
There is no rule determining a minimum number of words per page. But always keep in mind that the content must be rich and descriptive enough for your potential customers. Your visitors must eventually contribute to the redistribution of content that will have attracted them, and thus improve the overall notoriety of your website.
This on-page content optimization work must, of course, be complemented by off-site content optimization, with the implementation of a more global content marketing strategy.
Contact DMT web hosting today for multilingual optimization of your website, a necessary step for successful web internationalization.
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