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is somewhat different than Argentine Spanish. Even proper translation may be riddled with problems.
Foreign language search behavior often differs by dialect, and using the common terminology is key.
Indicating Language and Region
A webmaster should use the
lang
attribute in a meta tag, or inside an enclosing
span
or
div
tag in HTML.
Search engines may be able to detect language reasonably accurately, but this tag also provides additional
geographical information. The language codes
es-mx
,
es-us
, and
es-es
represent Spanish from Mexico,
the United States, and Spain, respectively. This is helpful, because a language dialect and region cannot be
detected easily, if at all, just by examining the actual copy. Here’s an example:
Use ‘<span lang=”es-us”>CONTENT</span>’ to indicate language in a particular text
region.
Or:
Use ‘<meta lang=”es-us”> in the header (“<head>”) section of the page to indicate
language of the entire page.
Table 12-1 lists a few examples of languages and region modifiers.
Table 12-1
You can find a complete list at
http://www.i18nguy.com/unicode/language-identifiers.html.
Server Location and Domain Name
Search engines sometimes also use the actual geographic location of a web server as a cue in target market
identification, and hence determining rankings in that region. Therefore, it is desirable to locate your web
server in the same geographic region as is targeted. It is also desirable to use the country-code domain
applicable to your target country, but that is not necessary if a
.com
or
.net
domain is used.
Language Dialects
English
en-AU (Australia), en-CA (Canada), en-GB (UK), en-US (United States), en-HK
(Hong Kong)
German de-AT (Austria), de-BE (Belgium), de-CH (Switzerland), de-DE (Germany)
French
fr-CA (Canada), fr-CH (Switzerland), fr-FR (France), fr-MC (Monaco)
Spanish es-AR (Argentina), es-CU (Cuba), es-ES (Spain), es-MX (Mexico), es-US (United States)
Japanese ja (Japan)
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Chapter 12: Foreign Language SEO
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