Edit 8 November 2010
I found one more good link today
8 Tips For Designing Better Global Websites
http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/8-tips-for-designing-better-global-websites/
Have country specific domains - it's better for search engines and better
for users to find you - in other words
.ie .fr .nl .jp etc. If you can't get
country specific use sub-domains -
fr.yourdomain.com. An example of this
is Yahoo!
Don't mix the languages on the same part of your site ie have two or three
languages on the same page.
Make sure the page defines what the language is in the code - this helps
with the browsers but also search
engines.
If you want to create a language 'chooser' - the ideal way is to have a
portal where you make the selection -
maybe a .com or .org portal.
Translate and optimise before you launch your site. (Have the
tranlations checked too!)
Choose the languages you target based on real need - not on ease of
translation (you may not be doing this
but some Web Certain research to be published soon suggests languages are
often added because they were
relatively 'easy' rather than
important target languages - and if
the alphabet is not roman - it's less
likely to be used.)
Make sure you can back up the language with the service - in other
words have a speaker of the language -
or at least explain that the user will
need to read English or another
language - to view or use the site.
Don't 'force' language based on country - urdu speakers may well be
British based in the UK. Nacho's given
you two very good examples to consider
in Epson and Greenpeace - but my
advice would be to allow the user to
choose the language AND location if
both are appropriate. Take Belgium on
the Epson example - that asks you to
choose Belgium - then to choose
between French and Flemish with French
at the top of the screen. There are
twice as many Flemish-speakers as
French in Belgium and they might have
expected top-billing. Equally, German
is also an official language of
Belgium (67,000 speakers) and is not
represented, English is used by many
of the institutions in Brussels. It's
complicated - allowing a choice of
language would be best.
Check your links, navigation and error messages are in the target
language too - it's a common mistake
for error pages to show up in the
wrong language. (A site I looked at
the other day gave an error message in
German, had a French title and content
in English....)
Test before you invest (phrase stolen from San Jose conference but
can't remember who used it?) Look at
using pay per clicks to trial your
approach before you roll it out across
all languages.
Good luck!
refrence - http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/archive/index.php/t-1156.html
and
If you can afford it, it’s best to
have a dedicated Top Level Domain for
each of your target countries (for
instance, www.wesellstuff.co.uk for
the UK and www.wesellstuff.cn for
China) as this will help to improve
your ranking with country-specific
search engines.
Best to avoid going for separate
sub-domains (for example,
http://cn.wesellstuff.com) as search
engines will view sub-domains more or
less as the same site as the TLD and
you will lose any of the relevancy
generated by your carefully
constructed in-country SEO techniques.
With this in mind, you’re also best
ensuring that your webhost for each of
your in-country websites has its
server based ‘in-country’. Some
webhosts use servers based in another
country and given that Google uses
this data in its search algorithm,
it’s of real benefit to each of your
websites to have everything as
localised as possible.
reference - http://www.thewebsqueeze.com/web-design-articles/how-to-make-your-website-multilingual.html
I found these articles are worth to read
Multi-Language Web Development
http://www.stylusinc.com/website/multilanguage_support.htm
Tips for planning multi-language websites
http://econsultancy.com/blog/5763-tips-for-planning-multi-language-websites
