Taking your multilingual WordPress to the next level

Hello everyone! Today Silo Creativo has invited me to write an article, which is a great pleasure for me, so here I am ;). I hope you find it interesting, though it is not the first time I write here, I am present every week, since I’m the translator of the page in English, and so are many translations of articles from Silo Creativo published every Monday anonymously.

The expansion of new linguistic boundaries with our WordPress allows us a greater uptake of readers, because if our website or our blog are in two or three languages will reach more users if they are only in one.

My name is Mar Valenzuela, and as you can see on my blog designed by Veronica and created by Ricardo, I am a translator of English, French, Polish and Spanish, so I encourage you to also expand your number of users by capturing readers of other languages, as Silo Creativo did a few months ago.

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If you are asking yourselves what exactly does a translator, this article will clarify your doubts. I also recommend this one on the translator in the web world.

After making my presentation, I would like to tell you about the importance of the proper use of keywords in translating our website in WordPress or the articles of our blog, since these can improve or not our position in the cloud.

How does the positioning or SEO in translating our WordPress in another language?

Everyone who has a blog knows it is very important that this is positioned well to attract more readers, thus producing a greater movement of users. How is this achieved? Well, in short, creating good content that is also claimed by a considerable number of people.

That is, as the blog administrator writes articles taking into account the specific words that must be added according to the user searches, the translator must also take into account the most requested words in the target language to achieve the same effect of the blog source language or to expand it having a greater flow of users on the blog of the new language added.

Thus, the translator will not have much freedom in translations and must always choose the strategy that best position the blog administrator.

Some options for working with multilingual WordPress

Currently there are several options to get your WordPress Multilingual whether you work with a blog in one language or you are in the planning phase of a project. Basically, the best options are: using a plugin or working with an installation of WordPress Multisite.

There are two good choices of plugins:

-On the one hand qTranslate
– On the other hand WPML (where I cooperate within the service offering text translations.)

Both work very well and are easy for the user, because they enable a new field within the administration panel of each article so we can include the translation for the text, the title and even the URL.

Furthermore, the WordPress Multisite option is more manual. This allows having two sites that share the same domain in a single installation of WordPress. Thus, we can place our second language in a subdomain (france.example.com) or inside of your domain (example.com / france.)

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Both options are good, the first is simpler and the second more manual. We will choose one or the other depending on the project we have in mind. But surely, if we focus on positioning, translations oriented to SEO will be more important than the tool itself. Let’s see it!

Do you think the translation includes an important factor in positioning our blog or website?

Well, as you have seen, translations are essential in positioning our blog or website, because, as you know, the words we write are those that will position our blog. So, a good translation of our blog can improve our SEO, as well as the use of keywords in the meta description (if you use a plugin like SEO by Yoast or All in One,) the excerpt, or the URL of the title of each post. But Ricardo can tells us more about this on his article on how to improve your SEO in WordPress or his articles on design and improvement of the user experience, always making appropriate use of fonts, as Veronica usually tell us.

At the same time, we must also add that, for example, in case of our WordPress has an English version, Internet searches of English users of England will not be the same as those of the Americans, Scots, Australians, New Zealanders or Canadians, so the geolocation of our users is an important factor that translators also have to take into account when choosing a word or another.

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Thus, it will be important for the translators to know the culture of the country for which they are translating, studying what the needs and interests are to check if the information that is to be published in this environment may be useful or not for that sector population.

During my experience I have found some information that might be curious. In Spain people usually search “free WordPress template” while in the United States has more searches “Premium WordPress template.” So if I’m saying that in countries speaking the same language there are differences, imagine in countries with different language cultures.

This is a challenge for the translator, but at the same time is very rewarding and you get great knowledge about the customs and culture of the countries for which you are working.

So, I encourage you to consider the words. Remember that they are who have the power to position our WordPress blog in any language. Regards! And thanks, again, to SiloCreativo.

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