SEO Translation: Can you please translate my keywords?
Lately I have been coming across many projects with this or a similar description: “Translation of keywords”, “Translation of meta-data”, some even describe it as “SEO Translation”. Is it pure ignorance on the topic or just another sign of the economic crisis? It’s true that companies strive to reduce or even consolidate their expenses on services such as translation and Search Engine Optimization. What these corporations fail to realise is that having their keywords or meta-descriptions translated, along with the translation of their website text, is highly unlikely to improve the Google rankings of their localized website.
The real problem in this case is that translation agencies and language professionals fail to communicate this fundamental difference to their clients: Localized SEO is not achieved by simply translating the main text and some web elements, but it involves a series of time-consuming, planned, and specialized techniques. The new trend of ”SEO Translation” is yet another ‘newcomer’ to our profession but it seems like some of us have “misunderstood” it. First, a translator who is partially familiar with SEO can provide only on-page SEO services, which means he/she will not deal with backlink building, directory submitting, blog commenting and so on. On the other hand, an SEO expert/translator can provide an all-around service.
Let’s concentrate on the first case: On-page SEO Translation has to do with two different but complementary tasks: translating the content of the website AND taking into account the SEO aspect during the process (intended readership, appropriate keywords, keyword density, meta-data, variations of keywords in the text, titles, H1 elements, alt descriptions etc.). Localized content has to be present in both the visible and the non visible (code) part of the website. A simple translation of keywords, for example, will get you a good text but not necessarily the text that local users would use to search for a specific product or service.
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