Simply put, SEO stands for “search engine optimization,” and that’s exactly what it does: it optimizes the positioning of webpages in search results. 📈

This “optimization” is achieved through a set of practices aimed at improving how your website appears in organic search results by helping search engines understand, sort, and present your content.

Since SEO allows you to achieve a higher ranking for your pages in search results, it will ultimately allow you to improve your website’s visibility when consumers search for services or products on search engines. 🛍️

How does a search engine work?

Let’s start from the beginning!

A search engine is a software system created in the 90s (yes!) that is designed to help users find information stored on the Internet in the blink of an eye! And these days, everybody knows how to search for information online—using keywords. 🔍

Take Google, for example. Google is the most used of all search engines. In fact, many people only know about Google, but there are many others, such as Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Excite.

Google is fully automated and gets information from a variety of sources, like webpages, content sent in by users, scanned books, public databases, etc. It starts by matching the words entered by users to an index, and then it presents the contents on the results pages.

When a page is found, Google will try to understand what the page is about by analyzing its content, cataloging possible images, etc.—this is called indexing.

And how does SEO work?

Search engines also use crawlers. Crawlers are also known as bots or spiders; you may have heard of them before! Crawlers are used to collect information on the content of web pages they find on the Internet. They will also follow internal links within pages and external links to other websites!

Based on the contents of those internal and external links, crawlers understand what each page is about and how it connects to the other pages that are stored in Google’s humongous database. This is known as indexing, as previously mentioned .

A user will then type something in the search box, and Google will use mathematical algorithms to extract a list of relevant results for the words entered. Algorithms are not stagnant—they are ever-changing and evolving with advances in machine learning.

These are called organic results. Results can be images, videos, or text, including news or opinion articles, business pages, and many other types of content.

These contents will be sorted by Google according to relevance. This is called ranking.🔝

Search engines will show 10 results per page.

The pages ranked first in the results list will be more visible to users, who tend to view only the top results to find what they are looking for. Thus, a website will receive more visitors if it’s ranked higher by the search engine. In order to rank higher, website owners need to use easy-to-rank keywords to get closer to the top.

For example, if you have a blog, your best shot is finding niche keywords (but relevant to your topics).

SEO is not one-size-fits-all.

Not every business website will benefit from SEO. For many, paid advertising, for example, will be more fruitful.

So, how do you translate keywords?

Well, it can be business as usual if that’s what the client asks for. No one’s stopping you. However, to get good results, keywords do require a special approach!

A professional SEO translation is much more than translating words literally. Search engines operate on a local basis—they search for keywords that are relevant locally! So, translators with SEO skills know they must consider the cultural specificities of the local target market.

Did you know people from different countries have distinct search habits?

Imagine you’re selling pastries online. UK users will look for doughnuts, while US users will look for donuts. 🍩 🍩

Translators should do research based on language, country, and local markets, and then use the insights obtained to translate the words accurately.

It would be awesome to start by understanding a bit of what we’ve discussed above: how search engines work, what’s SEO and what’s the purpose of an SEO strategy, etc.

Translated keywords are what help a website owner to access international markets, so word-for-word translation isn’t enough. Keywords must be localized or even transcreated.

Localized or transcreated keywords are likely to be much more effective in terms of increasing traffic. 🆒

If you’d like to find more about these and other services we offer, check out the rest of our website!