SEO in multiple languages

[jereprieto]

I'm doing SEO for an apartment rental web-site. We have one web-site for each destination. And for some (popular) destinations we have a separate domain for some languages.

For instance: http://www.barcelonacheckin.com/en for English and http://www.barcelonacheckin.com/fr for French

In another destination we have http://costabrava-ok-apartment.com/en for English and http://www.location-costabrava.fr/ for French.

We have good result with the separate domains for languages. But I'm facing two problems:

1. We do not get any progress in the ranks in English in any Web-site

2. There's a lot written about SEO in English and there are many opportunities to build relevant links. But we are out of sources for eg. French.

Our SEO routine exists of participating in forums on famous travel web-sites, guest post exchange with our blogs, link exchange and presence in Social media.

Can anybody give us some suggestions?

[rayvensoft]

I have some experience in this as all of our websites are in at least 2 languages - some in more.  I have found that I have had to do SEO seperately for each translated version of the site to get them to rank.  So, for the Spanish version, I had to work on creating links back from Spanish sources specifically to the Spanish pages.  For the Russian pages, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese and Korean pages I had to do the same.  The SEO work I did on the translated pages did not seem to have any noticeable benefit to the other languages SERP even though the pages are all like together.

It sounds to me that since you guys are primarily a French site, it may be that you got most of your links back to your French pages, from French sites.  If that is the case you may try to work on specifically getting links for the English section.

I hope this helps.

[DesignbysoapLtd]

Hi there,

Try producing an infographic and translating it into several different languages - this infographic can then be promoted to each geographical market and if it's well thought out, well design and promoted properly, it will start to naturally attract links from sources you were probably unaware of.

Here's an excellent example, Hostel Bookers had an infographic designed on Barcelona vs. Madrid, which was placed here:

http://blog.hostelbookers.com/travel/barcelona-vs-madrid/#.T7-SotXLy18

This gained them lots of natural links to that page - including a link from about.com (domain authority 94). In addition to publishing it here, they also got the infographic translated into Spanish, published it on the Spanish version of their site and continued to promote it to Spanish travel websites, gaining them numerous strong links to the Spanish version.

From there you can translate an infographic into French, Italian, Mandarin, Russian, etc. etc. and continue gaining strong international links that aren't manipulated (i.e. they're natural).

Also, I doubt the problem is that you're running out of sources, but rather than you need to widen your link-building methodology, as there's probably hundreds of sources you're missing.

Here's an excellent post on link-building methods from Jon Cooper - this should help you come up with some alternate ideas to form posts and link exchanges (neither of which are anywhere near the best options at your disposal):

http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

I've also included a link to my own post on content creation, which might help you with the production and promotion of high quality content:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/indepth-guide-to-content-creation-with-infographic

Hope that helps you! Good luck with your campaign.