Should I use the Root domain as a landing page for 2 languages?

[sellonline123]

Dear Sirs,

I am developing a  site www.mysite.com , this site has content in spanish  www.mysite.com/es and in english  www.mysite.com/en

I would like to know if for SEO purposes if it  would be good to have an enter page (landing page) at the root of the domain www.mysite.com  where the users can choose the language, so I can get backlinks from both languages  to the home page in this case the enter page.

The thing is for spanish I dont see many  seo resources so this way I can get links for the homepage www.mysite.com from english and spanish resources.

and then focus in each folder language to get links for each one, english link sfor /en and Spanish Links  for /es

Thanks in advance,

David

[sellonline123]

Thanks a lot Simon for answering, my site wont have any geo target , just english and spanish speakers, one of my concerns for example is about submitting to directories, if I dont have a landing homepage for language selection, so should I submit the spanish version with this url www.mysyte.com/es to directories in spanish and my english version with this one www.mysyte.com/en to directories in english , but this way my root domain wont gain strenght from the directories links. Thanks in advance, David

[SimonCullum]

Hi David

Two answers for you here:

1. If the Spanish version of your site is actually for people who live in Spain rather than say Spanish people living in the US, then your best approach from an SEO perspective would be to host the Spanish version of the site in Spain, with a .es tld, eg.  www.mysite.es

2. If your site is for say just US residents, those living there that speak American English and/or Spanish, then by all means have your site available in both languages.

In this instance, I would not recommend having a landing page instead of a proper homepage (e.g. at www.mysite.com) because that will be a barrier to your main content, plus most links to a site usually point to the homepage, they would be wasted links to a homepage that's just a landing page for language selection with no valuable content on it, a fake homepage if you like.

For this scenario, have your website default to the main language (probably American English) with an obvious and prominent option for Spanish speakers to easily choose to change the language of the site to Spanish.

Hope that helps,

Regards

Simon