Promoting non-english websites

[Koz]

Hi All,

Has anyone here conciderd building and promoting SA websites that are not in english? I'd be interested to see what the demand for Afrikaans/Zulu/Xhosa sites would be...

[Paz]

Hi Koz,

I would expect SEO in those markets to be comparatively easy. As I understand it, foreign language sites aren't sandboxed, but one problem you might have is that the search engines aren't as good at filtering out spam in foregin langauges as they are in English. If you look in the German serps for example, they're absolutely awful for competitive searches.

Traffic estimation is a really tricky one though. Best way would be to open an Adwords account, bid a few Rand on some terms and see how many hits you get for different keyword terms. Overture's and Wordtracker's traffic tools are pretty useful for Turkish searches (US results), maybe it's worth having a look at some terms in there.

[Chatmaster]

There are several Afrikaans sites available and the market is pretty lively. But compared to what we are used to it is relatively easy to rank for keywords there. As far as the other South African languages are concerned I have no idea. I can tell you though that they are all represented on the internet in some way, however english is still the preferred way, even for afrikaans people.