Language and Traffic
379 words | Last Updated: January 26, 2007 |
Want more traffic for your site? You can attract more people if you provide different translations of your site. And the best part is, you can do this easily with the help of a Wordpress plugin.
Check out Angsuman's Translator Plugin Pro for Wordpress 2.x Blogs, and be prepared to easily get machine translations of your page in thirteen languages: German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Dutch, Swedish, Greek, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Chinese.
(What, no Filipino / Tagalog?) 
More languages, more pages = more opportunities to be listed in non-English search engines.
Just be careful, though: Machine translations have a way of sounding hilarious. Perhaps it would be better if you could team up with someone who actually speaks the language.
I wonder if people in multi-cultural work environments (or schools!) will have an advantage in this field.
Here's a story about the power of language:
Whenever I used to enter a subdivision, the gate security guards would always stop me and ask whom I was planning to visit, and what the purpose of my visit was.
Those same guards would ask me the same question, at about the same time, everyday. Yes, I was visiting someone every day. And yes, I was stopped at the gate and made to wait for about 15 minutes while they checked if I was still welcome.
Anyway, I quickly grew bored with this routine and simply decided to observe those guards. I noticed they spoke in Ilocano, which is a dialect in northern Philippines.
So, I asked my friends in school who could speak Ilocano, and the following day...
Guard: What's the purpose of your visit?
Me: Manong, mapan agarem! (Sir, I'm going a-courting!)
Guard (smiles): Wen, Lakay! (Sure, Elder Sir!)
And from that day onwards, those guards would quickly wave me in, and the former 15-minute wait at the gate turned to just 5 seconds.
So yes, language does have an impact on people in the real world. Looks like the same is true in the search engine world of the internet.
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Manuel Viloria is your friendly multimedia internet publishing coach who helps you gain more traffic for your web sites. Whether it's through blogging, podcasting, article marketing, videoblogging, email listbuilding, or even through Web 2.0 or social network marketing, you can increase your website visitors today. For more information, please visit Get More Traffic | ManuelViloria.com
"Language and Traffic"
First Posted: January 25, 2007 | Filed in: Web Traffic Wordpress
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A TRULY NEGATIVE EXPERIENCE!!! WORST $30 EVER SPENT!!! ... some languages do not work at all.
in my case ( http://ferenc.biz ) Arabic and Norwegian does not work - so they were removed.
so much trouble with Google translation that I had to switch over to BabelFish due to getting a 403 Forbidden error for all translated pages from Google.
Google viewed my frequent translation requests as spam but setting the Translator Cache to 12 hrs still has not fixed the issue.
the plugin is $30 per blog!!!! PER BLOG!!! BE AWARE!!!!
additional plugins are $25.
the next version will include up to 32 languages per the manufacturer - http://blog.taragana.com - but that just sounds like more headache.
I think they are pushing a product which is NOT finished and NOT ready to be released yet.
a japanese friend of mine laughed her ass off at the translation. it is not even close to conversational level not to mention professional.
I have been feeling like a spammer generating this sea of garbage content just to increase the size of my blog.
for now I am removing it completely from my site until it becomes more reliable ... not holding my breath.