I have just been working on a project for a new client Das Landhaus. Being in the tourism/travel industry can be very dense so trying to get one step ahead of all the millions of travel agencies can be challenging. If your site is only 15 pages big and those agency pages have well over 100 pages, how will you ever compete. Well there is a logical answer…. increase the amount of content you have on your site. Now because Das Landhaus is German owned I went in search of a Translation WordPress plugin that was SEO friendly. In having the client site translated into German I would already double the content of my site.

Many of the translation WP plugins were not what I was looking for, most of them just translated the page using Google Translator but none of them actually changed the URL so I was not actually gaining any pages on the site.

After doing extensive research and trying and testing over 15 translator plugins I found that some did what I wanted like translate but took forever to install and was quite a mission to intergrate. So I fanally found one plugin that way easy to install and had all the functionality that I was looking for.

Transposh Translator Plugin

Transposh is a language translator that will convert your pages to over 50 different languages and even supports Afrikaans. This plugin stood above the rest because of its crowd sourcing capabilities. Instead of relying on Google Translate and MSN translate alone it gave the visitor the opportunity to edit the translation as Google Translate can give some ghastly translations. This does carry as small risk for spammers but the majority of users have good intentions in mind and will help with better translations.

You can test the translation as I have installed it on this site in the right sidebar, you will notice that instead of just translating the page by redirecting to Google this plugin actually creates a shortcode URL   which Google will pick up as a completely new page.

Warning: This plugin is not completely error free, I suggest you add one language at a time and then visit every page in that language and let the page completely load.  This plugin assigns a “token” tag to sentences that it has not yet translated so their is a chance that if Google is the first visitor to your site then it will still see the English version on a different language page. This will create a duplicate content risk. If you visit every page of the translated language site the plugin will store the translation in its database so that the next visitor will see a fully translated version. SO BE SURE TO VISIT EVERY PAGE BEFORE GOOGLE DOES. You will know if a page is fully translated if you refresh it and the Title has changed to the desired language.

Download this plugin

This page in Afrikaans, German, Portuguese, and Netherlands