1. Write content relevant to the country in which you are targeting with your website
2. Understand the local consumer mindset
3. Translate all sections of the website that you feel relate to your international consumer: e.g. title tags, alt tags, main site navigation, drop down navigation, downloadable PDFs, videos
4. Prioritize your content in order to make your international website cost-effective
   
5. Keep the bandwidth in check
   
6. Make sure your content and navigation are translatable
7. When working with a translating company, send all documents in the format in which you want them to be translated: e.g. PDFs, Flash, XML, HTML, etc…
8. Realize that your initial changes will be static; when updating the main site, consider any delays on the corresponding international sites
   
9. Plan your site carefully and take all necessary steps when translating for an international audience; by disregarding important aspects of a translated website, you will not have the impact you intended with your audience
10. Have staff on hand that can service your international customers successfully
    

For more information regarding international translation of a website, contact the staff at Ecreativeworks.

Ecreativeworks is an industrial internet marketing company based out of central Minnesota and southern California. We provide website design and development alongside search engine optimization. Some of our additional services include: online catalogs, multimedia, copywriting, product configurators, RFQ and Ecommerce, and various marketing programs. Visit the website to learn more.

A recent study released by comScore, Inc. highlights the social networking usage of Asia Pacific for February 2010. Social network traffic is increasing and reaching a wider audience with more time spent online than before.

The following graphs are pulled from the comScore website.

comScore relates the above data differences to the social networking habits via PDAs and mobile phones in low scoring markets. With the above graph attributing to the reach of social marketing across Asia Pacific, the following graph relates to the top social network sites. Facebook is on top of the leaderboard for many of the individual markets in Asia Pacific while India, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have local social networking sites taking the top position.

These studies exclude internet use completed on PDAs, mobile devices, and public computers including cafes and libraries. Social marketing is the fastest growing trend online worldwide. Facebook is so popular that on March 13, 2010 in the United States, it even surpassed Google in being the most visited website for the week. It was also number one on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Years Day according to Hitwise Intelligence.

Using social networking as an industrial company can be tricky. It’s important to target the right markets and know what type of social marketing will work for you. Social marketing incorporates a wide variety of things including blogging, forums, White Papers, podcasts, webinars, newsletters, and social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn. For more information on building your industrial company’s social marketing campaign, contact the SEO team at Ecreativeworks! We’ll help you determine the best route to reach your customers by building your company in the online sites your customers frequent.

It’s important to develop brand recognition for your company. As an industrial company, you need to come up with an idea of how to best portray your products or company in a way that ensures it won’t be forgotten.

The First Thought: Converting the Customer

The best way to do this on a website is through unique content, repetition of color schemes and navigation, and logo placement. Represent your products by showcasing your brand throughout your entire website or advertisement. Also, choosing a common theme that is easy to remember is important. You want people to automatically think of your company when they need something specific. For example, if your company does injection molding, you want to automatically register in a client’s mind when they need plastic molds.

When creating your industrial website, you want to make it easy to navigate and visually appealing. If the navigation is simple and your site is easy to jump from one page to the next, people will stay on it for longer periods of time once finding it in the search engines. You may be one of the top spots in Google or Yandex but if you don’t have what the customer is looking for or you make it hard to find, your conversion rate will be much lower. Also, the more visually appealing your site is, the more clients will return to your site for additional services or information. If you provide unique, quality copywriting for each page yet construct them to be the same in color scheme, navigation, and cross-linking, your site will be easier to follow and clients will be more likely to convert. After all, isn’t that the overall goal?

The Second Thought: What Makes Your Company Great?

When designing and creating your online presence, first consider the things you like about other company’s sites. What draws you to them? How does the content, visual effects, and navigation grab your attention? Second, consider what you have to offer your clients. What sets you apart from your competitors? What makes you a high quality industrial company? Highlight those things through visual stimulation and quality information. Third, consider your own visual appeal. What colors do you associate with your company? Use that color scheme throughout the site and make sure your name and logo are visible on every page. Also, use the name of your company throughout your online copywriting as this will relate your information to your brand. Recently, Ecreativeworks completed a website for a company that wanted to highlight their “green-friendly” guarantee. The site used green for their headers, navigation, and cross-linking and included the recycling image on every page. From the first page, the “Thinking Green” campaign succeeds.

By using repetition to build your company and website, you will be able to build your brand. It may seem boring, but when you consider some of the top performing brands, their websites most oftentimes use the same navigation and colors for every page. Consider Google. They use the same coloring throughout the entire site with the navigation staying the same regardless of what country you view it in. The colors are also the same. The only thing that changes is the language. Google is one of the only search engines used world-wide. The reasoning could be determined as such: first, because of its ease of use and simple navigation and secondly, because it’s become so wildly popular that people automatically resort to Google whenever they search for anything.

Final Thoughts

Though it would be practically impossible to build your company to the size of Google (they have close to 2 billion hits per day worldwide), you can build your site to appeal to a wide variety of people internationally. By keeping your site consistent regardless of location or service, you are building your brand.

For more information regarding brand recognition, contact the SEO team of analysts at Ecreativeworks. We’ll help you determine the best way to build your online presence.

For the past two weeks, we’ve talked about international translation for the content on your website. We’ve went over the things to avoid when writing text and things to consider when writing for translation. We discussed your targeted audience and culture and gearing your copywriting towards both. Now it’s time to figure out how to find the person or company you will use to translate your site.

You shouldn’t use just anyone to translate your site. Instead, choose a certified, established translation company. They should have credentials, years of experience in translation, experience in your industry, and have fluency in both the original and translated language. As ISO certification is important in many industries, it is also important for an approved translation company. Being ISO certified ensures that the company has been audited which shows compliance, experience, and skill in their profession.

Using a translation company that understands your industrial market is important. Using a team with terminology expertise will ensure that your text will be correctly interpreted. Many translation companies will employ people from a number of different cultures ensuring that they will be able to provide a native speaker to the translation projects they receive. Additionally, if your interpreter speaks in the native tongue of the culture you are targeting, they will be able to translate industry expressions properly. This will cause less confusion for the end-reader on your site.

Certified translation companies will be able to help you increase your “localized” search engine optimization, ensuring your company will show up in international search engines. From changing your navigation to tweaking your keywords, online translation experts know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to the search engines in China, Russia, Mexico, and other countries.

The translation company you work with should also have an open communication policy, involving you 100% in the translation of your website. There should be no hidden costs with all pricing discussed upfront. Look for a company that will use more than one person to translate your site, ensuring the best possible translation and proofreading. Also, the company you choose should provide non-disclosure forms and guarantee confidentiality.

At Ecreativeworks, we help industrial companies target an international audience. We can help you find the right translation company. The companies we work with that provide products and services world wide  receive impressive results in the search engines which in turn increases their business leads. For more information on how you can increase your international sales or if you have questions regarding translation services for search engine optimization, contact us! We’ll help you determine the best way to increase your online presence whether you work with companies across the street or around the world.

When writing text that will be translated, it’s important to consider your audience. Are they really young or part of the baby boomers; professionals long in the business or brand new interns? Not only is that information to be considered, but it’s important to consider the culture the text will be translated for. Do they prefer the sensitive, generalized, or factual writing? How large is their language and are you using words and phrases that are easily interpreted into it?

Choosing the appropriate age group for your content is important. Your targeted age group will generally determine whether your content will be written professionally or with a more lighthearted tone. If you are targeting all ages, write somewhere in the middle. Writing both professionally and casually can be stating the facts with a friendly approach. The way you write your content is the way you portray your company—customers will perceive you based on your website.

Choosing the right context for your end-reader is also important. You don’t want to come off sounding brash to a reader who prefers sensitive undertones and you don’t want to be emotional with a customer who wants to read straight-up facts. Study the culture you are translating to in order to determine the most appropriate way to write. For example, the Finnish language has two different versions of their language: standard language for professional writing and spoken language which is used in personal communication. Another example shows that some languages of Southeastern Asia do not have a word for “no”. When writing for these cultures, it’s important to know the differences between your own language and the end-readers.

Another important thing to consider is your text length. What is said in a sentence in English can be said using one word is other languages. Or where one word is used in English, it may take a full sentence to portray your meaning when interpreting. According to a leader in international translation, translating from English to other languages usually results in a 33% increase in words to correctly interpret your text. Because of this, linking, pictures, and other items relating to your text may have to be altered for the end result.

Remember to proofread everything you write. Correct grammar and punctuation are important when it comes to translating from one language to the next. Consider this sentence by Groucho Marx in the 1930 film, Animal Crackers, “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas, I’ll never know!” Using incorrect sentence structure or punctuation can be very confusing for the interpreter, making the end result confusing for the reader. Make sure your language is clear, concise, and written for your targeted audience in a form they will approve of.

For more information regarding website translation, or to begin your industrial website, contact us! We’ll help you find the easy way to design, develop and maintain your industrial website. Whether your clients live next door or you work with customers across the country and around the world, we’re there to help you gain maximum online exposure.