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Language Localization in EverWeb 2.4 for Better SEO!

The latest EverWeb release, version 2.4, adds a new feature that uses language and regional localization to help boost your website’s search engine results rankings. Your website will be better able to target your desired audience as potential visitors will be served results that are more specific and relevant to their search than before.

EverWeb 2.4 can take advantage of geographic location and the languages used in your website, which when combined with HTML’s language features, provide an SEO boost. As you’d expect, EverWeb makes Language Localization easy with just a few mouse clicks.

You can use the language localization feature for either commercial or non-commercial purposes e.g. businesses may be focused on serving customers in their own region, country or internationally. Non-commercial websites, for example, non-profit organizations, local associations, hobbyists and so on, may gain better reach and more focused results when trying to attract their target audiences such as local or regional markets or specific language groups within their area.

How Does Language Localization Work?
Language localization works in three different ways:

  1. For the website as a whole, i.e ‘globally’,
  2. At the webpage level only or
  3. Using a combination of the above two methods i.e. the website has the global language set, but occasionally this is overridden at the webpage level when needed.

The following are some examples demonstrating how to use, and get the best from, Language Localization:

Going Global!
At the global level is where you set the language localization for the whole website only. As an example, a website has been developed in EverWeb to sell digital products globally only via the internet. In this case, you may think that no language localization is needed. However, if the website itself has been developed in Spanish, it may be advantageous to set the global language to Spanish as well to better target Spanish speaking visitors.

To set global Language Localization:

  1. Go to the Site Publishing Settings either by using the menu File-> Edit Site Settings, or by clicking on the website name in the Web Page List;
  2. In the Head/Footer section of the Site Publishing Settings is a new setting ‘Language’, just below the Favicon setting. Click on the ‘Language’ drop down.
  3. When the list appears you’ll quickly see that there are numerous languages listed together with lot of local variations based on country. To get quickly to ‘Spanish’, start typing the word itself. Predictive search is used, so as you type you’ll be taken down the list quickly. Locate Spanish.
  4. For our example, we can just use the generic ‘Spanish’ without specifying a country to target all Spanish speaking visitors.
  5. Once Spanish has been selected, publish the website. Use File-> Publish Entire Site to make sure that the whole website adopts the change you have made.

Global Setting, Local Market
In the next example, a national animal welfare organisation, based in Austria, has designed their website using EverWeb. In this instance, the website will probably want to target only potential visitors in the Austria itself. As German is the language spoken in Austria, the global language would be set to German (Austrian).

Global Setting, Multiple Markets
Switzerland is an interesting country as it has a population of about eight million people and four nationally recognised languages: German, French, Italian and Romansh. A Swiss company may build a website with webpages in some, or all, of these languages.

In this case, the developers might select the most appropriate, or dominant, language used in the website as the global Language setting in Site Publishing Settings. This could be German, French or Italian (Romansh is not included as it’s only spoken by 0.6% of the population and so not listed.) Alternatively, the website developers could decide to have no global language and set up language localization just on a page by page basis.

Whether the website uses a global language setting or not, it’s likely that this website will want to set up Language Localization on a page by page basis. To do this:

  1. Open the website Project file and go to first web page.
  2. With the Inspector tab of the Inspector Window selected, go to the Page Details section.
  3. In the ‘Language’ option, select the language that is appropriate for your page e.g. French, German or Italian. Leave the setting blank if the page is in Romansh, and use other EverWeb SEO techniques instead for this language for SEO purposes.
  4. Repeat the process for all of the other pages in the Project file that need localizing
  5. Publish the website using File-> Publish Entire Site.

Same Language, Different Countries
There may be instances where your website uses one language but targets different countries that speak the same language. For example, an English language based site may specifically target markets in the US, the UK, Canada, Ireland, Belize, South Africa, New Zealand and so forth…

In this case, you may want to set the global language setting in Site Publishing Settings to English without specifying a country, then have country specific web pages using the language of English, but with their own specific country identified e.g. English (United States), English (Belize) etc.

When using EverWeb’s Language Localization options it may take a couple of weeks to see if it has been effective on your website visitor stats. If you find no uptick in your website traffic, you may also need to implement some other measures as outlined in EverWeb’s own SEO Course.

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