In our view, the most important aspect of content management systems handling multilingual sites is the problems they cause with URLs containing lots of numbers and digit style parameters - instead of the normal words which users are looking for.

This is exacerbated in languages other than English because often the parameters will use English words - which don't assist with the performance of the page in the search engines. For instance, a car sales page might be called www.carsalesite.fr/?ID=car3264 - when the target language would prefer 'voiture'.

So you have to look out for a multilingual content management system from the outset.

Another aspect which i would say is equally important is that a content management system must provide is the ability to easily edit meta and title tag information for every page.

The more information that you can give search engines about your pages the easier it becomes for someone to find that page when they search, and while well formed urls are a big help, the page itself has to be correctly search engine optimised - in the target language - for best performance in a search engine.

Some of the most important (SEO) aspects one should look for in a CMS are:

• The ability to specify the exact URLs of your pages. If you want your page to be called bmw-car.html, then you should be able to do so. You want to avoid a CMS that forces dynamic urls upon you.
  
• The ability to change the HTML Title tags of each page to the last character. You don't want the CMS to dictate anything to you, or force some dynamic title upon you.
  
• The ability to change Headers and Alt Tags. If you can't change these basic things, avoid the CMS.

Greetings to all fellow forum members,
Here in Italy we are working on a few very nice plugins that will make the WordPress platform (nearly) 100% multilingual.

As I blog bilingual this has always been an organizational problem to me. There has been an ongoing debate about whether WordPress can be used as a CMS and I have always been against it - (Using WordPress as a CMS). That is until now ... I'll keep you posted on progress ;-)

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Sante J. Achille
Search Engines & Web Marketing Consultant
skype: rifardo

Hi sjachille and well met!

That sounds like a very interesting project, looking forward to hear more about that.

I would be interested in this too, getting wordpress multilingual would be very cool.

In actual fact, there is no technical need to have a multilingual WordPress. Let me explain a bit more here. I have been blogging multilingual now for over a year and have never had and language problems - all posts are doing fine. The tricky bit was to get the website architecture tuned properly.

The real issue I was faced with is more market oriented: Blogging (or simply creating a website) isn't a matter of mere translation. There are issues that require attention in one market that perhaps are superfluous for another audience - this happens to me all the time.

So it's really not a matter of having a plugin to translate things from one language to another, but to have the liberty to write freely in all the languages you are using without having to fall into a grid that your CMS is forcing onto your website.

This is what we are doing as far as multilingual is concerned.

Secondly there is a major limitation about WordPress: the template.

Every modification you wish to implement WordPress requires modifications on the template - we have come up with a solution that will allow the user to add new menus to the template without coding the page, but by simply modifying a parameter via the WordPress back end administration.

This means that WordPress will really be a CMS and that everyone and their dog will be in a position to use it as if it were a CMS.

If you have any further suggestions or comments on our approach please do share them with me and the others in the forum.

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Sante J. Achille
Search Engines & Web Marketing Consultant
skype: rifardo

I'm a Wordpress.com user !
This is the perfect example of well developed Multilingual SEO on a Blogging system !
The only thing that make me SAD !
Multilingual RSS encoding / Charset

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Bilel Consultant SEO
Référencement
Djerba photos
Tunisie Annonces seo toolbar

I believe that we are all going in the right direction here. We need to have it in mind that the Internet is a marketing medium, just like any other. The problem is that we tend to make it sound to technical. Having said that, I want to stress that it companies are reinventing the web and having to choose a new CMS that is most likely going to be one of their most important decision in regards of using the Internet as the marketing tool it has the potential to be. What I would always recommend is that companies set their goals and online strategy before choosing their CMS and before designing the web. There are too many cases out there in cyber-space where companies did not lay the foundation properly and there for never got the success hoped for. Choose your CMS wisely.