Bilingual site – SEO

  • I built this photo portfolio website with a ‘.nl’ extension. My main target group is people in holland but I would like the non-dutch speakers to be able to find and read my site too. So I decided to build this site in English (menu bar, page title, urls, about page and a blog page). But now Im worrried that the Dutchies wouldnt be able to find me through a search engine since they will use dutch keywords. So I think I should translate the about page and the blog page (there is only 1 post and its not that I will be posting very often anyway) which is not much. The question is, how should I approach this ? I read that it’s a bad idea to make a bilingual post side by side because that is duplicated content. But how else should I resolve this. Also my menu bar, page title and urls are in English in there a way to have this in Dutch as well but hidden. So its searcheable of not noticeable. Since this is only for SEO purpose and not because I want my target group to be able to read the menu bar in Englsh. And at last how should I create my alt text. Should I just create 2 lines. 1 in English and 1 Dutch

    So my quesions are:
    – how can I get my menubar, page title, urls written in English be searcheable with Dutch keywords ?
    – what is the best way to post the about page and blog in 2 languages ?
    – should I write the alt text in English and Dutch after each other ?

    Hope someone can help me with this.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

  • Hello @hazy23

    1- what kind of menu is it? JS or plain CSS?

    2- The official stance from google is that it’s not counted as duplicate content if the translation is “professional”…what they mean by that is that if you just take the text and use google translate to translate it and then paste it under another page in another language, it might trigger some flags. However, if the language is “natural sounding” and has a human touch to it….which I am sure they have some type of algorithm for, it’s not counted as duplicate content. You can find more info on that: Here

    3- The best way is to create a homepage for each language you plan to use, ant then make it the parent of the rest of the pages of that language. You should make use of the

    <link rel="alternate" href=" " />

    tag and make sure that all the translated pages have that tag. More on this: here

    You should also make use of the

    <link rel="canonical" href=" " />

    if the content is very similar . More on that Here

    You should also declare the language of the content if you want it to be served to a specific region/language. More on that: Here`

    hope that helps

    Thread Starter hazy23

    (@hazy23)

    Thanks for your quick response.

    Maybe I should have said that Im new to website designing. This is my first site built ever with wordpress
    1 I used the a child theme for twenty sixteen template. I think its a plain css but not sure. Maybe its easier if you have a look at my site https://www.hazelling.nl
    2 Great … so thats not an issue for me
    3 I was not really planned to create different homepages for each language. Unless this is the way to go. I was only intended to translate the about and blog pages since those are the pages with text content. Other pages are only image based. But I like to add content to the alt text fields for SEO purposes by writing in English and Dutch both. Not sure this is the best way to do.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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