How to develop Your Website to More Languages.

If you have a really fashionable website, the idea of expanding that site to reach more languages has maybe crossed your mind. Such an expansion could mean a broader audience reaches in more countries, higher traffic, and the potential for more revenue.

The latest webmaster help video, featuring Google's Developer Programs Tech Lead Maile Ohye, gives some huge advice and best practices for expanding into additional languages and country-based language variations and ensuring your site is search-friendly.

Much of the video covers belongings like how you should approach a language expansion, things you should consider before doing it, and cases on how this can be done. It also touches on a couple of the more important search issues that can crash a website regarding multiple languages.

One of the more significant things to be sure you include on international variations of a website is the special language and regional tags that can help Google understand how they should be helping your websites and to what languages and countries. The use of rel="alternate" hreflang="x" is highly recommended to avoid many issues. Google has an entire help document on how to use these tags correctly and successfully.

One large potential search issue sites find out with language expansion are when sites the incorrect page is shown in the search results for the incorrect user. Another common issue is when the search outcome show similar URLs from your site, which confuses the user about which pages they should be going to, and why there are two unusual pages offered for apparently the same site and content.

Lastly, search engines might not be alert of all the different languages and language variations that website make, or they omit some pages for special languages because Google doesn't know that the seemingly duplicate pages are actually serving a different audience or language variation.

The entire video is very detailed and extensive. It is well worth watching if you're considering development into different countries and languages, so you can be aware of all these types of problems and how Google recommends you solve them to best serve your users.