Now we are in 2013, to say that a company needs a business website to boost its presence on the marketplace is obvious and trivial. Websites have become, over time, a vital tool for businesses. They are real online marketplaces through which businesses advertise, sell, present their products, recruit new professionals, organise suppliers and much more.
It is not just a business card but a real channel with which to manage and expand their business.
The real problem is: how to get noticed among the billions of results and millions of web pages?
The answer comes from recent developments in marketing, which study increasingly dynamic and innovative methods to take advantage of the web as a means of communication. It is no longer simply web marketing, there is also social media marketing, geomarketing, SEO and much more.
SEO activities, in particular, assume strategic importance to increase the ranking of a web space – as suggested by the acronym which stands for Search Engine Optimizing.
But what is meant, specifically, by “search engine optimization”?
When you search for something on any search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc…), it returns a set of results with the help of specific programs known as spiders or crawlers, which plumb the depths of the web to find the words (or words) of the search. The results are classified according to an order (ranking) which is defined according to a set of rules, that takes into account a multitude of factors, including, to name a few:
- a clean code and the structure of the code;
- coherence and quality of the information;
- definition of the meta tags (description, keywords, etc…);
- definition of the URLs;
- link structure;
For a more complete discussion on the operation of the search processes, Matt Cutts, software engineer at Google, has created some useful explanatory videos.
Apart from all this, it is undeniable that the keystone of human communication still remains the use of language, and when the context becomes international (or even global), translation and localisation play a strategic role in the positioning of a company in a specific segment of the market and/or in a foreign market, even on the web. The translation market itself is evolving in this direction, trying to keep up with the times to meet the demands of an increasingly exigent and busy clientele by offering increasingly comprehensive and multi-channel services.
Translating the content of a website in a foreign language is now a necessity for a company that wishes to be visible in a foreign market: the real challenge is to get noticed, given the vastness of the web.
It is at this point that SEO and translation meet. The translation of a site’s content simply helps foreign users to understand the texts; but the optimisation of a site in a foreign language helps the company to multiply the number of foreign users who can visit the site. Therefore, it is of strategic importance to pay special attention to the translation of all those meta elements (writing these in compliance with the dictates of the Google Webmaster Centre), such as those mentioned above, that can contribute to the optimisation of a web page but which are often overlooked by customers because they underestimate the importance of these elements and sometimes are even unaware of their existence.