Want more blog traffic? Want more eyeballs in front of your content? Then why not translate it into other languages to appeal to a wider audience?
We often forget that no every speaks, or reads, English. The US, Canada, Australia, UK, Ireland and Guyana are the only areas that speak English as the main language. There is a handful of other countries that speak English, but not as their primary language. Then there is everyone else.1 There are billions of people who don’t read English, yet few blogs offer translation options on their site.
To easily translate your blog from one language to anther you can add a Google Translate menu to your site and let Google handle the translations on the fly. They may not be perfect, but they are better than having none.
I like the Google Translate option as it’s easy to install and doesn’t cause any duplicate content issues. Plus it will work on any blog or website.
Another option is the Global Translator WordPress plugin. This one adds flags into your sidebar and creates sub-directories for all the translated content. All these sub-directories are then indexable creating a lot of additional pages on your site. They are duplicate content, yet in different languages, so I guess it’s up to the search engines to figure out how to handle that.
No matter how you do it, offering up your content in different languages opens up your site to a larger audience.
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i’m using global translator. but, just using 2 language. indonesia and english
This is something I have thought about doing in the past but is the Google translator accurate these days? The last time I used their language tool it was spitting out words in other languages that were apparently not correct.
Accuracy is an issue with any automatic translation. But I tend to think that something is better than nothing.
I totally agree. At least with automatic translation, even if it’s slightly wrong / illiterate, people will get the gist of it.