My good friend Dave recently launched a blog for his job at CD Chivas USA, the Carson, CA based soccer team in the MLS (that stands for “Major League Soccer”, for those of you too patriotic to accept soccer into America. Yeah, that’s right, America has professional soccer. And you know what? It’s pretty good.). His blog is the Official Bilingual Blog of Chivas USA soccer: an inside look into a professional soccer team, with updates on team news, scores, player profiles, and more.
A little back story on CD Chivas USA: (”CD” = Club Deportivo) the team is considered the “Sister Team” of CD Chivas Guadalajara, a team based out of, you guessed it, Guadalajara, Mexico (ok, I just like writing “Guadalajara” because of the absurd use of the letter “a”). The idea of CD Chivas USA is that it appeals to more to the large Spanish speaking population in southern California. Unlike the local rival LA Galaxy, which appeals to faux-hawk enthusiasts.
Well, seeing as how my daily job often consists of helping companies launch and popularize blogs, it seemed only fair that I offer up a little advice to help the Chivas Blog. After going through some very broad basics, Dave and I started to discuss Search Engine Optimization.
Some of you may have seen this coming from this post’s title, but there is an inherent problem in this project. The problem is that the idea of an Official Bilingual Blog of Chivas USA soccer, is that it would in fact be bilingual. My original idea was to write it all in English and install one of those language converters to the site- but Dave, being fluent in Spanish and knowing how horribly those tools actually translate, is aiming to make this a true home for Chivas fans of any background and not alienate the Spanish speaking supporters. Instead he is writing in both Spanish and English, depending on the topic.
So I’ve been reading up on as many sources as possible about bilingual SEO, but the main thing I’ve learned from it all is that there isn’t that much written on bilingual SEO…
The incredibly broad idea behind a standard SEO strategy is to improve search engine rankings, so that when someone searches for something online (which everyone does…) they’ll find your site first. BUT- what if your readers aren’t always searching in English? And what if you are writing half of the posts in Spanish?
At this point, I should probably warn you that if you came to this page looking for authoritative answers, you might want to leave now… sorry about that. But the following are a few things I’ve picked up, just by watching the site and some of its click stats.
- In a site with bilingual text, make sure any relevant SEO terms exist in both languages. If this means repeating information, that’s fine.
- As with any SEOd page, you don’t want to over do links to piss off the search bots. You work way too hard to be seen as a Splog, so if you are repeating information and writing things twice, be cautious of how often links appear.
- Bilingually tag images. By shortening the descriptions but having key words in both languages, both audiences will find what they are looking for.
- If you aren’t writing everything twice then make sure to write enough in each language to appeal to both audiences AND the search engines. There’s a fine balance of alienating either language’s readers, but keeping relevant stories in each language published often enough will keep all readers happy.
There is still so much to learn about all this and if anyone has any advice on reading material (in English please) comment below. The one problem I keep going back and forth on is the Page Title and Meta Content. My instinct is telling me to stick with English because more people are searching for English text, but that just leaves the question: Is it better to get a huge percentage of those searching for Spanish text, or a small percentage of those searching for English text? The answer is likely “which ever one is bigger”…
Anyway- If you want to check out the Official Bilingual Blog of Chivas USA soccer, then you can click that link or check it out on Google, which after just a month is up to #6 for “Chivas & Blog” and #31 for “Chivas USA”.
April 23rd, 2008 at 5:34 am
There is a case for saying different languages have completely different audiences, and so should be on different websites. That way, the SEO for each site can be targeted at the major search engines for different languages. At the least, I’d expect to find the content in different sections and pages. Having it on the same page is bound to confuse search engines.
This would also be targeting two large audiences, instead of one niche audience. I’m guessing that the audience for people who would read stuff in English plus those who would read stuff in Spanish is much greater than those that would equally happily read both English and Spanish.
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:54 am
Sean!
Unfortunately, I completely agree with you. Two blogs would likely not be too much more work, but would keep both audiences happier than having both on one page.
I can’t imagine that there is a large contingency of both English and Spanish speaking readers, but if there were then they would likely be just as happy reading things in just one language.
However- what’s really interesting about Chivas USA is that it truly is the team for the bilingual demographic. So I think that even though there might be a smaller following, it’s going to be a stronger community than a large, loosely tied following.
Thanks for commenting!