Who is your audience? If you are trying to sell a cleaning service it is probably local. If your site is a personal interest blog the world is your target. Some interesting tools have evolved to support a world stage.

A favorite WordPress plugin I used is called WordPress Global Translator Plugin.

http://www.nothing2hide.net/wp-plugins/wordpress-global-translator-plugin/

You can see this plugin in action on this site. Just click on the flag to view the site in that language. The installation is trivial and configuring simple.

There are some interesting issues with bots attempting to scan your site in another language. I found the FreeTranslator setting worked best for me.

There are three ways people find a website:

1. Direct entry (visitor keys in the address)
2. Search Engine (visitor searches on Google or some other search engine)
3. Referred by another website (visitor clicks on a link in another website)

Direct

Direct entry to a website assumes the visitor knows the address of the site. They learned of the address in an advertisement, from a business card or word of mouth. The visitor must type the address into the browser address field so it is important to have an easy to remember address. The address must be remembered from the TV ad and entered after walking to the computer.

Website addresses are not case sensitive so www.RichHelms.ca is easier for someone to remember then www.richhelms.ca

The balance of the URL may be case sensitive though. www.RichHelms.ca/first is not the same as www.RichHelms.ca/First. On a Linux or Unix based system the balance of the URL is case sensitive.

Direct entry will usually land you on the front page. With the exception of a simple extension like www.RichHelms.ca/enter people will not remember or want to enter them. This means front page design is critical to enable visitors to find what they are interested in with one click or search. A first time visitor is not going to navigate a complex menu or several clicks to get there.

Realize also some new newbies (people new to the internet) do not know you can enter a direct address. I create a website for such a person and told them to go to the address. This new surfer told me they couldn’t find it as they were going to google and entering the address. As the site was new google had not crawled it yet and didn’t know the address. I related this giving a person a phone number and them explaining that they can not call the number as they can not find it in the phone book. The core problem was the person did not know they could directly enter an address. Their browser had the address bar disabled. (Never Assume)

Search Engine

Probably the most common way people find a site is via a search engine. Google, Yahoo and MSN are the popular choices. A user types in keywords and a two lists appear. The first are popular sites with those words, the second is paid advertisements that listed those key words as indications that they ad was appropriate for that user.

Two factors drive search results. First is having the right key words in your site. Second is when you are found showing up high in the list.

Say I am writing a website for a doctor. A visitor may search for doctor, doc, Dr, general practitioner, healer, MD, medic, physician, specialist or surgeon. Some may seem more appropriate. I had an interesting conversation in a web writing class I was teaching. The student owned a cottage that they rented to winter sports fans. Their target audience was mostly Europeans. A popular activity at their cottage was snowmobiling. Their website referred to this as Ski-Dooing. For those not familiar with snowmobiling, in 1958, Joseph Bombardier designed the first modern snowmobile. Bombardier, the father of snowmobiling, began production and marketing of the Ski-Doo snowmobile in 1959. While most Canadians will recognize Ski-Dooing as a brand specific reference to snowmobiliing, my question was what do Germans call snowmobiling? This is what they would search with for a cottage in Canada to go snowmobiling.

Driving your site up the list is a whole industry in itself. The two keys are links from other credible websites you your site and a constantly expanding content. A static site with 2 year old content will fall down the list. If you want to really look at search engine placement optimization do some searching. Be careful of companies that promise for $30 a month to put you on top of the list. It isn’t that easy.

Nice intro to search engines http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters

Referred

A referred visitor is someone who clicked on a link in another website that is not a search engine. The link to SearchEngineWatch.com above is an example of a referring link. This site would refer the visitor to the other site. The advantage of a referred link is there is some implication of recommendation for the other site. In this case when I was looking for information on search engines in Google this site was one I clicked on. It appeared to have good content introducing search engines as a marketing vehicle. Clearly they were geared to supporting their services but the general information was applicable to someone investigating search engines.