print pageMultilingual CMS and SEO
One of the major benefits of having your web site running with muiltilingual content is the postitive effect it can on your search engine rankings. Web users in many leading countries do not always use google.com as their main search page, a large percentage will use country specific google home pages such as google.es or google.de.
Often they will search for phrases in English and if you have a language specific translation on your site then you stand a much better chance of ranking higher. For example if you have a page called "world's best pizza" in english and the page has a spanish version titled "la mejor pizza del mundo". Someone on google.es might still search for "world's best pizza" in English but as you have a spanish translation of that page it can have a postiive effect on your ranking.
So the ability to increase your websites inbound marketing is greatly increased and then you also get to inform the user of your products and services in their native language once they have found you. Whilst it is hard to give exact metrics as to what this can mean to your business one can estimate that this should improve your web sites hits from search engines by at least 25% for each language. A pretty good return given the effort and money put into SEO to get a small percentage increase in just one language such as English.
For a multilingual site to really work then the CMS must not only have the ability to run site content in many languages but also meta tags, titles and search engine friendly URL's. This is where ShadoCMS as a Multilingual CMS is outstanding as it accounts for all facets of running sites in multiple languages.
