Search Engine Optimizing Toward The Hispanic Community

There has been a running discussion among the SEO community about whether or not going through the efforts of optimizing web content for Hispanic visitors is a valid exercise. Some believe that optimizing and marketing towards a community that isn't known as being search engine savvy (a misconception) isn't a worthwhile endeavor. Discuss The Hispanic Search Market at Google's Zeitgeist, by June of 2004, Spanish speakers made up approximately 10% of all "languages used to access Google". Considering that Google claims to have up to 200 million searches per day, that gives you an amount of 20 million Spanish speakers searching for information, and that doesn't take into account the volume of searches that are being performed. To further the point about the numbers support this type of optimization, Nacho made an image of a graph that appeared on the SearchEngineWatch forums that revealed the online population for Spanish-speaking web users, complete with a regional breakdown. View this image Nacho recommends identifying what money keywords in Spanish are converting into sales for the Hispanic community related to your business and develop landing pages that will accommodate these visits: "Then build a theme section relevant to that Spanish keyword and use that to increase your traffic reaching the Hispanic market... This way, you don't have to translate your entire website into Spanish. Plus, these theme sections make ideal landing pages for your PPC campaigns reaching US Hispanics as well ("kill two birds with one stone"). How much you want to follow through all the way down to a complete Spanish checkout will depend on the level of conversions and degree of exits among your users from their paths taken." These are merely a few pointers on how to optimize an English language site for Hispanic visitors. The "how" shouldn't be too difficult, just ensure that you are using a reputable translation service. Think bigger than the Babel Fish tool. Another member of SearchEngineWatch Forums that goes by the name of Orion showed through a great example how words in Spanish can give different meanings and therefore website owners need to be very careful to both get the right search engine traffic and display the correct message to its users: "For example, the Spanish word "cuero" means leather, however we have the following peculiarities. In Cuba, cuero means drums. In Puerto Rico, cuero also means prostitute. In Mexico, cuero is also a nice thing to say to a girl. So if you say something like, "Que cuero de mujer!" in Mexico sounds like flirting with a girl but in Puerto Rico is more than an insult. The word "coger" in Spain and in the Caribbean (Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, etc) means "to take" and "to grab" but in Mexico and South America means -let put it in this way- "to do it" and the four-letter word. I apologize for the crude examples. Check latest search news.