Best practice for multi-language site?

[JonnyGreenwood]

Recently our company is going to expand our site from just english to multi-language, including english, french, german, japanese, and chinese.

I deeply understand a solid and feasible plan is pretty important, so I want to ask you mozzers for help before we taking action!

Our site is a business site which sells eBook software, for the product pages, the ranks are taken by famous software download sites like cnet, softonic, etc. So the main source of our organic traffic is the guide post, long-tail keywords.

We are going to manually translate the product pages and guide post pages which targeting on important keywords into other languages. Not the entire english site.

So my primary question is: should I use the sub-domain or sub-category to build the non-english pages? "www.example.com/fr/" or "fr.example.com"?

The second question: As we are going to manually translate the entire pages into other languages, should I use the "rel=alternate hreflang=x" tags? Because Google's official guideline says if we only translate the navigations or just part of the content, we should use this tag.

And what's your tips for building a multi-language site? Please let me know them as much as possible

Thanks!

[McCannSEO]

Yes that's a good point. So if you are just translating content but not targeting it to specific countries only, you can use href lang to specify the language, without specifying the country. E.g.

would specify French Canadian content but

would just state that it is for all French speakers.

In this case, you wouldn't need different top level domains to target each country, which is probably more than what you need!

Hope that helps.

[katemorris]

There is a difference in targeting by country and targeting by language. What I am seeing here is that you are translating only. You won't be distinguishing Canadian traffic from France traffic right? Just have your content in French?

[McCannSEO]

I'm not sure of the definitive answer to your question re. subfolders / subdirectories but have you considered using ccTLDs? As this is still the clearest way to tell Google what country you are targeting. Obviously there are logistical points to consider on this.

See what everyone else says but there are some great articles here:

http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/international-seo-strategy-guide http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust

Re. href lang, yes I think you should implement them if you are keeping the info all on the same domain but you don't have to do it on a page by page basis - you can make a sitemap. More info  and free tool to generate them here:

http://www.themediaflow.com/2012/08/an-international-seo-implementation-tale-sitemaps-relalternate-hreflangx/
http://www.themediaflow.com/resources/tools/href-lang-tool/

Hope that helps!