The World Wide Web was originally mostly a tool for the Western world and English speaking people. That’s been rapidly changing in recent years; English will soon no longer be the predominant primary language of Internet users and web page translation is becoming a increasingly important strategy in web site marketing.

While over 350 million people speak English as their first language and it’s estimated somewhere around the same have English as a second language (and to varying degrees of proficiency); given that the global Internet population is now over 1 billion and rapidly climbing in Non-English speaking regions; that’s a huge number of people and potential customers who may not be able to read your site. It’s interesting to note that as of the end of 2006; Asia had more Internet users than the USA!

A client the other day, who is a plumber in Chicago, asked me, "What do I care if someone in Asia can or can not read my blog? They're not a customer anyways?" - You have to look at the BIG PICTURE.  ROI  does not always come in the form of a customer hiring you.  Perhaps a foreign magazine see's you as an expert, and wants a quote from you.   I had someone from France, who only spoke French, contact me about an image on my site. Turns out, I owned the image. And he wanted to buy the rights to use that image in a brochure he is developing.  You never know where the ROI  will come from.

Here’s something you might not have considered and perhaps a very important motivator for having your web site translated into different languages. If you translate a page into a different language; search engines see it as a totally separate page; so it’s another ticket in the search engine lottery. Your 20 page site translated into 7 languages suddenly becomes a 140 page site casting a net to a broader audience.

So, a multi language site will not only bring more visitors to your sites, but the number of pages that show up in the SERPs will increase as well. Yahoo/Babel  and  Google  both have  easy-to-install  codes to create a language button for your site.