Maintaining the "long tail" of a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign conducted in multiple languages is frequently trickier than a simple use of Google Translate, according to SEO experts.
Andy Atkins-Krüger, writing for Search Engine Watch, says that international search engine optimization (SEO) can depend on seemingly minor details, like properly placed accents or understanding the grammatical differences between a pair of languages. He warns that Google Translate is frequently a highly imprecise tool, missing idiomatic meanings and colloquialism.
Atkins-Krüger uses the example of an English-to-German translation of a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign to get results for cheap air fares. In addition to different accents, Atkins-Krüger says that German is one of the most frequently misspelled languages on the internet, further complicating the SEO task at hand. As well, extensive compounding of German words – "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" is supposedly the longest word in the language – can make SEO more difficult.
International search engine optimization (SEO) is likely to see further changes in the near future, as the effects of the non-English character implementation by ICANN become more widely felt.
