Did you know that English is a minority language on the Internet. In fact, only about 35% of the online Internet community is English speaking. That has huge implications if you’re marketing anything on the internet, particularly if you have a product that is being distributed worldwide.

Translation of websites is not a new idea and there are ways to do it and ways not to do it. If you want to maximize your websites potential, don’t use on-the-fly services. Why? Well, they won’t get additional pages indexed so they won’t get additional traffic to your site. Also, if you’re using Google adsense, then your ads won’t come up in the translated language. If your website is translated properly, then your Google ads are displayed in the translated language. Makes sense right? In Japan, guess what language they see the Google ads in? J.A.P.A.N.E.S.E. Go figure… Same goes for any language - check out an example of a translated site I’ve been translating in Japanese. There may be some inconsistencies on the site until Google indexes the translated site fully and still display the ads in English but once they understand the language the site is in, the ads will always come up in the translated language.

But translating your website by humans can be pretty expensive especially if you’re looking at lots of pages like the site above which has hundreds of pages. So what’s a solution? Well software translations of course. But don’t be fooled as their are good solutions and bad solutions. The translation solution I use and am happy with has proved to be a winner. It’s fast, reliable and accurate. Best of all, it’s very inexpensive at only $67.

One of the biggest benefits of translating not mentioned so far is that more traffic to your site in non-English versions of the site means that your site overall will move up in the traffic rankings which will have a positive effect on your Page Rank and will therefore result in more traffic for your main English site. So in conclusion, translating websites is a positive, a big positive. If you have not translated your site, your missing out on about 65% of the online world. When you walk down most cities in the US, you’ll see signs in Spanish etc. So why not do it to your site?

Translation of websites is one of the most overlooked internet marketing strategies currently available. If you're interested in finding out more, visit our blog dedicated to helping internet businesses be smarter and make money.