This world is a great big place with 6.5 billion people in it. Many of those people do not have Internet access yet, but sooner or later they probably will. A great number of the people on-line today, also do not speak English.

What is a good SEO strategy to reach those people with your web site? You could hire a good translator for target international markets, and have a web site in each language just for those people. Does that sound like a great deal of work? You can bet it would take a serious investment of time. If your company has a full-time web designer, that is a realistic possibility, but what is the little guy to do?

Google has just added a new feature that helps in translation of your web page into multiple languages. Previously, there was only a text to text translator page. Now, you can just type the URL of the web page you want to translate into the bottom box on their translator page located at Google Language Tools. (see below).

There are currently 40 languages available on the Google translate page. How good is the machine translation ? Google actually did an impressive job with this translator. 200 billion words were indexed from the United Nations archives. Although it is by no means perfect, it really is not bad at all. I tried it with a particularly difficult French idiomatic expression.

« Je vais m'en jeter une, derriere la cravate », and it came up with a perfect literal translation, « I will throw myself some behind the tie”. I never expected it to be able to understand that phrase, which means, I’m going to get a drink, (like the alcoholic kind), but it took an idiomatic expression in French and formed a grammatically correct fully understandable English sentence out of it.

I tried it out on some other slang, and it totally bombed, but who is going to use slang on their web site anyway? So far as the printed word goes, I have to say it is acceptable to me, as far as my imperfect French goes, at least. You can try it out on any foreign language site, and you will probably not be able to understand every word on the site, but you will understand just enough to understand what's going on. At the very least, it should give visitors to your site that do not speak English, the gist of what your site is about. Good Luck with your International SEO Strategy.

Google Language Tools

Here is an additional article:

Google Translator - The Univarsal Language