What is truly the purpose of blogging? For businesses, it is to better communicate with their customers. For others, it is to keep in touch with old friends or meet new ones. The ultimate purpose is to “talk” to a diverse audience.
I have been blogging for only a week now, but I have seen traffic skyrocket in the past few days. It is amazing to blog to such a diverse group of people. I now have readers from all over the World, including Germany, Japan, Mexico, Italy, China, and Korea. This is fantastic, but unfortunately, my blog is not translated into those country’s native languages. Some of the readers might know English, but the fact is that I am mostly unread by those countries. Not only that, but foreign language search engines are just NOT indexing my blog. This is a problem, but there is a new solution.
Angsuman Chakraborty has produced a plugin for WordPress blogs that will translate your blog text into 12 different languages. It simply makes an automatic mirror of your site in each language. You can choose either Google or Babel Fish as your translation software. Granted, the translations may not be perfect, but this is the right step in globalizing your blog. The plugin translates into the following languages:
- German
- Spanish
- French
- Italian
- Portuguese
- English
- Japanese
- Chinese
- Korean
Afer you install the plugin, Google and the other search engines will now index your blog in each language. One blogger mentioned he went from 250 to 1,650 indexed pages in and saw traffic DOUBLE in 2 weeks. The plugin does cost $30, but it is well worth it considering you are now reaching a MUCH wider audience. The plugin is easy to install, but the programmer has to customize it for your individual blog. This only takes a day or so.
Find out more about the translation WordPress plugin…
Another very useful article, Nate.
My brother has a website where he offers an introductory course to Learn Mandarin:
http://www.chineselearnonline.com
I think this will be very useful to him. Thank you.
Btw, my business partner Anthony is now also a regular reader of you blog.
Hi Nate – thanks for the compliments and supporting MadWhips.com
It’s very appreciated.
We have had a rough version of our site up since October – Much of the current functionality has been up for only 3 weeks. It’s quite amazing watching traffic coming in, and pictures coming in. We still have a lot more to development to do.
We are in the early stages, much like yourself. This is going to be a tremendous experience for both you and us, growing our sites and businesses, I have no doubt. Wishing you lots of success, dude.
And btw, My brother has now implemented the translation plugin on chineselearnonline.com, and that is directly due to you, so thanks on his behalf.
Hi Nate i just chanced upon another wordpress translator plugin : http://www.nothing2hide.net/wp-plugins/wordpress-global-translator-plugin/
I’d like to seek your opinion which one is better in terms of search engine optimization?
Does making an automatic mirror of site in each language means that when i search e.g. in chinese, search results of my site displays in chinese instead of the default english?