How to start a multi-lingual website?

Google has just posted a nice little article on their blog, sharing some simple tips about starting a website in multiple languages.

Have you ever thought of creating one or several sites in different languages? Let’s say you want to start a travel site about backpacking in Europe, and you want to offer your content to English, German, and Spanish speakers. You’ll want to keep in mind factors like site structure, geographic as well as language targeting, and content organization.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

Then the artcile clears up some good points in these three main areas of web design and development:

1. Site structure

2. Geographic targeting vs. Language targeting

3. Content organization

The simplified key points are as follows:

Site structure:

Arrange the content for various languages in their own sub-domain and in their own sub-directory such as:

Put the content of every language in a different subdomain. For our example, you would have en.example.com, de.example.com, and es.example.com.

Put the content of every language in a different subdirectory. This is easier to handle when updating and maintaining your site. For our example, you would have example.com/en/, example.com/de/, and example.com/es/.

Geographic targeting vs. Language targeting:

You should set different geographic targets for different subdomains or subdirectories (e.g., /fr/ for France).

Content organization:

The same content in different languages on the same website is not considered duplicate content.

All in all it is a pretty simple to understand article.