Andy Smith SEO

Having lived in Tenerife, a Spanish island, since 1994, I have a fairly good command of the language and am often called upon by my clients to deal with the authorities and large corporations. In the last couple of years, clients have started asking me to translate their websites and optimize them for the Spanish search engines. Initially I was reluctant to take this responsibility and insisted that the clients were responsible for the translations and selection of keywords. As a result of their lack of understanding of keywords and the lack of suitable research tools, initial efforts produced only limited results. However, with the help of Google, the situation is now quite different.

The Google Keyword Research Tool, which many of you will already be familiar with, is now able to produce very usable output in a wide range of foreign languages. You can access the Google Keyword Tool in Spanish (Herramienta para palabras clave) here and can change to just about any language when you are inside.

My personal experience with foreign SEO is limited to Spanish but my research indicates that other nationalities are also finding it easier to achieve good results by applying only basic on-page SEO strategies coupled with a limited amount of link promotion. I am sure that as time goes on it will become as competitive as it is in English but for the time being, “any SEO is better than none”, will go a long way in foreign language search results.