Managing your web

PANAMÁ. If you have decided to launch a business in Panama and are thinking of making your website bi-lingual, there are some hurdles to jump. Due to the complexities of the Search Engines – Google, Yahoo and Bing (the new one from Microsoft) being the main operators - it is not as a easy as simply translating the pages.

Search engines typically provide 87 percent of the traffic and 82percent will not go further than the third page so to your website so language optimization is paramount.

It is difficult enough to get onto page one of Google but the problem multiplies with international search.

Many hours have been spent crafting the key words that make your current website a success. These keywords are the phases that your customers are likely to enter into the search engine when they are looking for information.

But you can imagine the havoc that will be caused when a translator comes up with a perfectly correct but hardly ever used phrase in the translation. Your website will never be found.

The search engines have a set of rules that they apply when they are looking for the best web pages that meet the search criteria.

Some of this data is visible on the website pages and easy for you to check, for example, headings, the first paragraph and the use of bold. However, the prime fields are hidden in the website like page title and meta description and not so obvious and without these key words your site will not be located.

In which countries do you want to be found?

In some situations, a searcher may prefer limiting their search results by country or region rather than language.

For example, to avoid shipping charges,.a search for pages in Spanish may bring up results from Mexico, Argentina, and Spain.

To solve this problem, most search engines apply country or region filters.

How do the search engines decide which country your web pages come from?

Two main factors come into play: The location of the server that hosts the site and The site’s domain name ending such as.com,.pa,.es, etc.

If you insist on only using a translator to convert your website make sure that they are aware of the points above and create a set of keywords which they must use in the appropriate places and make a thorough test before you put your new website live.

Better still, employ a qualified website company who can manage website build at the same time as performing the translation.

Michael Price is an IT service specialist, operating in Panama.