The irreducible quality of blogs is their accessibility. People from around the world are both writing and reading text pieces in a myriad of different languages, dialects, styles, and forms. Across the globe, indiscriminately of where you live, modernity has allowed us to exchange and share the information we want effortlessly and rapidly. Blogs are one of those information sources that the majority can leisurely scroll through either as enlightening material or as pure entertainment.
Quick Links
This is what blogs are about – spreading the power of the word and giving everyone a chance to speak their mind.
English and Its Universal Usage
There is no denying that English being the universal language today, is best suited to reach the wider audience and get the broadest exposure. If we are to look at the current statistics, we can safely say that you will most certainly hit the most significant margin of people by writing your blog in English. 26 percent of all the information online today is solely published in English. Despite Chinese users dominating the World Wide Web in terms of quantity, the Chinese language still trails back in second place. Spanish proudly ascends to the third spot with 8 percent of total web pages written in it.
What we can gather from statistics is that you won’t be wronged by writing in English. Although there are still a lot of variables that come into play, English is your safest bet if you want to enlarge your audience.
Languages That You MUST Turn Your Attention To
The same, however, can also be said about other languages. Despite English being so popular, we are still talking about only the ¼ of the Internet. In crude terms, what we are leaving out is 75% of potential readers. Certainly, you might not homogenize all of the worlds into a visitor stream to your website. Depending on your location, niche, time zone, and many other factors, there will inevitably be a dominant and prevalent country in your monthly report. Is there any value in translating your blog into other languages, and how it can affect your Search Rankings?
Before getting into the article’s pith, let me first present another case for why you might want to diversify your website’s lingua. It’s really hard to imagine the sheer scope of active users from both India and China. These two countries combined to reach a staggering active user count only a bit shy of 1,5 billion.
With China, there are a lot of things that bear mentioning and a lot of “buts” that need to be accounted for in terms of site availability and their scrutinized control. Still, they are a massive contributor, and, considering that less than one percent of people speak English, there is a whole lot of untapped potential ready to be explored.
On the other hand, India, being head and shoulders more democratic in everything internet related than China, is truly a promising traffic destination for your blog. Despite Hinglish (Indian English) notoriety and omnipresence, the rough estimation of people capable of talking in English in India is still reeling in the range of 10% and 20% being the generous estimate of the total population.
Spanish and Portuguese speaking communities are also not to be understated. Mexico, Brazil, Spain, and Portugal easily cloud over the US in terms of the active user count. In Spain, the statistics imply that around 27% of the population have mastered English to a desirable, speaking-capable level, meaning that more than a ¼ of the populace still relies solely on the information in their native language – this amounts to 375 million people. This is a number that does not deserve a halfhearted approach.
How To Optimize Your Blog For Different Languages
Now to the heart of the article or how to optimize your blog for different languages to have every element in place.
Improving Search Ranking is no small feat regardless of the language you are tuning it to. The good news is, if you are already half-satisfied (you can never be satisfied enough with your traffic) with the performance of your website on its original lingua franca. The burden on your shoulders is far lighter. For those still figuring stuff out, I would wholeheartedly recommend first to tackle the core mechanism and then think about refitting it with new gears.
With that being said the first rail to glide by is – translation. How else would you optimize your website for a variety of languages? I’m not going to enumerate every element of a veritable translation and what qualifies as one. The only thing that is worth stressing is – don’t use machine translation for the blogs. This kind of negligence will not be beneficial in any way. When it comes to translating, it is better to splurge a bit than do a half-baked job.
What you can skim on is the translation of UI elements. This is where Google’s services might be of help. Not only does it cover the whole spectrum of languages (100+), it also does this with quite surprising precision. Since many UI elements are not context-heavy by themselves, Google Web Translator manages to settle this one with ease. Not to mention that it is completely free.
Undoubtedly, going forward and seeing the results of branching out into other languages will make you think about translating everything manually. However, in the very beginning, it might not be that urgent.
Tailoring specific content to a specific language group is also a very effective method of expanding a website’s horizons. You can pick, let’s say, Spanish speaking community, and instead of generalizing every piece of your content, occasionally make something specific and relevant to the given group/community. In this way, you are far more likely to attract new audiences by catering exclusively to them, making them feel less discriminated against and more cherished in a way.
If you don’t feel up to the task of creating a separate content piece in a certain language, and you want to offload it to someone reliable and experienced – there is no shame in that. Out of a swath of different services that offer to improve your SEO rankings, Linksmanagement, available at https://www.linksmanagement.com, strikes as one of the best options among backlinks services you can choose. Decades of experience on the SEO battleground have honed LinksManagement professionals to be both quick in delivering a promise and pedantic in its execution.
LinksManagment will aid you in elevating your website or blog to new heights with one of the most bleeding edge and novel methods of SEO, transforming your mood and gloom, tumbleweed-empty website into the bustling megapolis full of traffic and merriment.
Author Bio
Nancy P. Howard has been working as a journalist at an online magazine in London for two years. She is also a professional writer in such topics as blogging, IT and marketing.