Multilingual blogs

strategy & means

Here’s the deal

• I have been challenged by a group of entrepreneurs who want to install a multilingual team blog next to their service (it’s not a functionality of this service).

• I am not the technical type (even my own blog, www.mobjazz.com is actually down) so if you’d like to comment, please do so.

3 identified strategies

• One blog mixing different languages on the same page.

• Many blogs with automated translations.

• Fewer blogs each with specific contents / manual translations.

Bots against people

• Strategy 1 & 2 may be better for positioning but certainly annoying for your audience– Who wants to scroll pages to find the posts written

in their own language?– Auto-translation doesn’t make sense.

• Strategy 3 might be less search engines effective but it makes sense for your readers. My recommendation.

Choosing platform: Wordpress against blogger

• Normally, this question is irrelevant because - as far as I know - blogger cannot localize your audience and direct them to the relevant page.

• But then again, it’s a team blog so: traffic will grow from search engines and the service own pages, and favorites.

Criteria

• Set-up, maintenance and back-up

• Template management

• Search engine optimisation

Set-up and back-up

Wordpress• how many plug-ins can

you install: multilingual plug-in, specific text editor plug-in to edit multilingual texts, databases for each language, back-up plug-in

Blogger• It’s all there out of the

box

Template management

Wordpress• Strangely enough,

localization plug-in seems to concentrate on language detection and translations.

• Still, it seems - please confirm if you have more info - some plug-in will let you work on one template only with translated texte interface (eg http://wp-multilingual.net)

Blogger: it’s weak point• For small templates

changes, you’ll have to evolve templates separately for each of your blogs.

• For massive changes (eg brand identity) you’ll save time with export and import templates functions.

• Manageable if you don’t have too many languages/blogs to handle.

Search engine optimisation

Wordpress• More plugins will allow

you to rewrite url, ping more ping services and so on and so on.

Blogger• Blogger is a Google

service. Need I say more?– Nice search engines’

friendly url – Auto ping Google– Tags instead of

categories that let’s you work on key expressions

– …

In a nutshell

• With Wordpress you’ll need a lot of resources and it might (I’d like to emphasize might) provide a more efficient multilingual blog.

• But blogging is not about spending time on technical questions, it’s about delivering the right content to your audience.

• Providing you don’t have to handle loads of blogs, that’s what blogger does, right out of the box.