“WordPress SEO is the most complete WordPress SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress.org users. It incorporates everything from a snippet preview that helps you optimize your page titles, meta descriptions and keywords to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between.”

It’s for those reasons and more SEO Translate integrated closely with WordPress SEO to ensure that pages and posts translated as pushed as effectively as possible through the sitemap created by that very plugin.

Developed by 28 year old web developer, SEO, and online marketer, Joost de Valk, WordPress SEO is the leading plugin available for turnkey optimization of your site. Joost has worked in everything from enterprise hosting to online marketing agencies. He founded CSS3.info, the biggest CSS3 resource on the web, built Quix, and runs a weekly podcast with Frederick Townes called the WordPress Podcast. Bottom line, he knows SEO cold, WordPress colder, and how to develop plugins colderer.

About WordPress SEO

Bottom line, WordPress SEO is the fullest featured plugin available; dealing with everything from the obvious meta content and permalinks to robots.txt files and your sitemap.  You’ll find a detailed review of each of the plugin features in the plugin’s thorough description:

1. Post titles and meta descriptions
2. Robots Meta configuration
3. Canonical
4. Breadcrumbs
5. Permalink clean up
6. XML Sitemaps
7. RSS enhancements
8. Edit your robots.txt and .htaccess
9. Clean up head section

Not enough?  Yoast, the brand behind WordPress SEO and which you’ll increasingly recognize as a WordPress user, is working on add-on modules to support news optimization SEO, video SEO and local SEO.

While fully automated search engine optimization remains as out of reach as perfect machine translation, Yoast’s work gets pretty darn close and, with SEO Translate, can help you reach a much larger audience throughout the world.

Your decision depends on only two considerations
1. Are you trying to attract other language speakers in your country or are you trying to attract speakers in other countries?

If a United States based business looking to expand to Mexico, a .mx version of your site (with hosting based in Mexico!), in Spanish, makes good sense. Your placement of the site in country firmly establishes your relevance as such. Local domains with local hosting usually rank better.

2. If instead your goal is to expand based on the language alone, and not place your business or service in another country, stick with your original domain and use a sub-directory (i.e. domain.com/espanol/) to host the translated pages. Translated paegs are not considered duplicate content by the search engines and the links you will build to the various pages translated will contribute to your entire site’s ranking. Yes, that’s a down-side of setting up unique domains not mentioned previously; though being in country helps your rank relative to searches in country, you’re effectively creating new web sites – each with their own rank, authority, and equity.

What about a sub-domain?

Sub-domains such as espanol.domain.com offer a unique set of considerations. On one hand, sub-domains are treated like new domains in the eyes of the search engine. You’ve created a completely distinct site with its own rank and authority and might have a good reason to do that with your translated content. On the other hand you don’t derive the same benefit you would if you host that unique site within a country related to the language translated. You get the benefit of a unique site but the disadvantages outweigh that uniqueness. Bottom line, we don’t recommend it.

For this very reason, SEO Translate automatically translates your entire site into dozens of different languages through a sub-directory. Ideal for the blog or business that intends to remain focused on their country of origin but looking to reach a much broader audience through the various languages SEO Translate can make available, you need not look any further, as a WordPress site, than right here.

Your goal is to reach other potential customers, readers, and clients by making your site available in other languages; by reaching the audience searching for your content in those languages. Rest assured, translated pages will reach that search audience.

International SEO: Does Translating Content Make It Duplicate?

Our friends at seobywebmechanix.com recently explored this very question…

The simple answer here is no.

According to Google’s Webmaster blog, “Though we do offer a handy translation utility, our algorithms won’t view the same article written in English and Spanish as duplicate content.”

Your site presented your way; with 35 languages available as easily as publishing your next blog post.

Navigate to the simple settings we’ve provided under Settings in the left nav of your WordPress dashboard.

Then, it’s as simple as A, B, C.

A) Select the original language of your site and opt in to the languages you’d like to provide.

B) Choose where to display the language options to your readers; you can opt for a sidebar widget under your Appearance settings.

C) Click Save Changes and you’re done.

We’ll take care of the rest!

Fair to say SEO Translate is like a Babel fish. Granted, we went with orange instead of yellow but stick it in WordPress and your site is immediately translated into as many as 35 different languages.

Pretty cool.

After weeks of research into website translation, the impact of translation on SEO, and existing tools and services, we’re excited to release SEO Translate.

What makes SEO Translate unique? It’s easy to use and integrated with SEO plugins such as WordPress SEO to ensure translated content has a significant impact on your bottom line. Don’t just make your site available in multiple languages; expose that content through Google and reach an even larger audience.