Engineering a New World

A passion of my life for some time has been in figuring out the details of foreign-language and foreign-character-set SEO.  How do you do Search Engine Optimization for foreign character sets – and specifically SEO on languages that do not use traditional roman characters, but instead use Cyrillic, Kanji, Mandarin or Greek characters? 

SEO is getting to be more and more a normal thing to do, and less and less of a hidden black art.  Google has made it plain enough times that what they want is good, fresh, updated, relevant content,  and not a bunch of garbage.

Pursuant to that, you’ve got a ton of fairly-well-documented best-practices for SEO’ing your site.  And, if you don’t know the first thing about SEO at all — well — read a good book on the subect.  My favourites are:

• Search Engine Marketing, Inc. – Bill Hunt / Mike Moran
• Search Engine Optimization an Hour a Day

Or you can just hit SEOMoz or SEOBook for some hot tips.

But one unfortunate thing is that most of the best SEO data is coming people who are ignorant Americans like me.  Despite my love of geography and far-off places, I can speak no foreign languages fluently, except for some Korean bad words I learned from fellow soccer players.

What does that have to do with anything?

Take the preceding picture I just linked to where I’m doing a soccer throw-in.

Assuming you could edit that page, if you ask any search engine novice to optimize that page to show up well for its subject matter, they’d probably tell you to hit the easy things first.  They’d tell you to optimize:

- HTML <title> tag
- <meta description=> tag
- <meta keywords=> tag
- <H1> text
- Body text
- text of inbound links
- filename of the page

Ideally your page would have “Soccer Throw-In” or a more unique title and <h1> text, and would have a description and set of meta keywords that followed along.  Ideally, as well, you’d have a filename like “/soccer-throw-in.html” or similar.

Easy, right?  Of course it is — in English.

But, let’s say you have similar items in German, or worse, Japanese, Greek and Russian!

As an example, the Japanese word for “soccer” is “サッカー“.  What do you make as the page title for that?  The filename?

If you do a google.jp search for “サッカー“, one of the first results you get is a Wikipedia article for “サッカー” which has a displayed URL of:

Now, of course, anyone with any technical sense will tell you that you can’t put non 7-bit ASCII URLs into an HTTP request, as that violates the spec.

But of course, pasting such a URL into your browser automatically decodes it to:

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B5%E3%83%83%E3%82%AB%E3%83%BC

So, it has the benefit of (a) showing up with the proper Japanese term in the search engine result page, improving the apparent relevance of the result, and (b) well showing up at all in the top 10 listings at all — so you’d think it has SOME positive impact in ranking.

European terms are much easier, as there are common transliterations for many of the non-7-bit-ASCII characters that one would use in normal usage.

For example, Google for the beautiful German city of Düsseldorf.  Clearly, one wouldn’t want to have to title all one’s pages as “Dusseldorf” as that would mean “village of idiots” as opposed to Düsseldorf which refers to the small tributary of the River Rhine.   The u umlaut is easily transliterated to “ue” generally, so by Googling for “Duesseldorf” you get an acceptable result – as Google knows what you’re talking about.

Not so easy with these other languages like Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, etc.

I’m very interested for any input or feedback on this, as it’s a massive gray area right now — and I don’t know if ANYONE has this one covered well.

Technorati Profile

It’s unfortunate, but I would be willing to wager that the grand majority of websites out there are a total short-circuit of any type of sensible planning & prototyping cycle.   After a recent visit to Boxes & Arrows,  I stumbled across an ad for Axure, a piece of software designed for the whole wireframe & prototype portion of the web development cycle. 

It made me reflect on how much my own methodology has changed through the years, in terms of the production line for a website, and how it makes its way from an idea in your head, through to a finished product that people use. 

Pre-Photoshop era:

When I was first making websites back in ‘95-‘96, the idea had not even entered my head that I could design my site in Photoshop and then actually make the item that I designed.  Design tools were so primitive, and table support so bad & varied, that you couldn’t just make a design and know that you could execute whatever you designed.  It was only with IE 3 that you could finally do tables with a background image (a revelation), and both Netscape and IE implemented that differently.  

So, in any case, my prototyping environment at that time was something called Microsoft Visual Notepad [jk].

It was only after I first tried Macromedia Fireworks in 1999, and was then able to hack up a fully-designed page and output it as HTML and images, that I decided that prototyping might be more entertaining than programming 5 bad websites in a row before finally getting it right.

Working out the production line:

All of that said, through quite a bit of pain and bad websites, I finally ended up with a production line that worked.  I, of course, didn’t make this all up on my own, as I had hit the books pretty hard trying to find out who had workable systems and methodologies that worked.   

In terms of best references with respect to the website production line, here’s what I found to be the best resources:

1. Communicating Design by Dan Brown (not the Angels & Demons Dan Brown – a different one) This has probably the single best explanation of the various sub-products and deliverables that go into planning out a website.  A truly awesome reference that anyone – even web developers and Photoshop d00ds should read. 
2. Planning by Product – the Targets & Goals Booklet by L. Ron Hubbard:  A free course you can take on-line, which gives you the basics on how to plan and organize any product or activity, and see it through to completion.
3. Lynda.com has a great video on the website planning & development process, with tools and tricks you can use to communicate the design better to the development team.