Assuming that only English speaking readers will be interested in your content is a mistake. Until recently I never considered the possibility that non English speakers could be an audience for this blog. So how do you go about making your content more accessible to those who speak other languages?
Internet language use statistics
- Languages # | Users | % of Internet
- English | 235 m | 38.3 %
- Chinese | 69 m | 11.2 %
- Japanese | 61.4 m | 10 %
- German | 42 m | 6.8 %
- Spanish | 32.7 m | 5.5 %
- Korean | 25.2 m | 4.1 %
- Italian | 24 m | 3.9 %
- French | 22 m | 3.5 %
- Portuguese | 19 m | 3.1 %
- Russian | 18.1 m | 3 %
- Dutch | 12.4 m | 2 %
- Polish | 6.7 m | 1.1 %
- Swedish | 6 m | 1 %
- Arabic | 5.7 m | 1 %
Source: Translate To Success
English is the most common language spoken on the Internet, but it is still only 38% of the total users on the Internet.
Update Services
Adding an update service to your blog that sends content to foreign language search engines and directories is the key. Update services communicate to other web sites that you have updated the content on your site. I have always looked for ways to optimize this process. At one stage I added a list of 50 or so different sites for WordPress to ping whenever I posted. This of course slows down posting and didn’t seem to work particularly well. So I went back to using Pingomatic, which is the default service for WordPress. This works great as you only have to ping Pingomatic and they do all the hard work of pinging other sites (Google, Technorati etc) to notify them that you have new content. However, Pingomatic is an English only service. Pingoat is a update service that also pings foreign language services. You really don’t have anything to lose by adding Pingoat to the update services for your blog, but to convince you of how useful it can be… the article I posted just yesterday has already been commented on in French , translated and re-posted in Japanese and Italian.
How to add Pingoat Update Service to WordPress
In the dashboard of WordPress go to “Options/ Writing” and paste the following address into the update services, I have also left Pingomatic there.
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
Brian Purkiss
Does that strategy work if you blog is English only? (like mine)
Do you need a translator or something along those lines?
Simon
Hi Brian, I didn’t do a thing to get those other bloggers to use my content, so yes it works, you don’t need to translate. Although I guess it might help, I am going to add translate buttons at some point. Cheers.
Brian Purkiss
Ok.
Thanks!
And if you ever do end up placing Translate buttons on your blog – do a post!
I’d love to know about what you’re using, why, and how to do it.
learning Italian
I heard that persian was the number six most used language for blogging. a lot of Iranians cannot gain access to direct new source media so they rely on foreign blogs to keep them updated about the world around them.
Chris Johnson from Translation Services
Nice post.I start learnig english 4 years ago,and about 1 month ago found Pingoat and is great!
ingilizce çeviri
Turkish people also use internet very much. And the internet usage is growing up very fast.
Daniel from Spanish Translations
These automatic translators are very good for webmaster with a small budget. Although they are not perfect, somehow foreign readers complete the reading based on their intuition.
Evan from Teach Yourself Violin
I think this is a great post to bring awareness about non-English speaking users. I know there is a plugin for WordPress called Global Translator that will use internet translation services to translate the pages on your blog into different languages for the user.
monika from Tunnel Design Engineer Jobs
English is the most spoken language world wide.its need is everywhere no matter you do not know the local language of a country but f you know English than you can easily communicate.
Steven
Thank you you were the only one i could find online that has the pingoat code thanks I hope to get results from this. Also to contribute i find non english speaking people finding my blogs the most. So i cant wait to see if this works.
Sarah from Sultan Costumes
From time to time I add a Spanish post to my blogs and then comment about the post on other Spanish blogs…I find I get a boost in traffic every time I do it.
Sophie from Soldier Costume
I have built websites in Spanish before and actually got really good results. It’s a lot easier to rank well for competitive keywords in languages that aren’t English and there are still millions of potential readers as your table above shows. I think many people are scared of creating a website in another language, but these days with the help of outsourcer’s its actually not that hard.