Better targeting your indic language site

Thursday, November 13, 2008 at 8:50 PM

A lot has been said about how to start a multi-lingual site and how to better target content through meta tags. Our users have raised a number of interesting questions about creating websites in different languages, like the one below.

‘ganex':
> How does one do for INDIA.
> As there are many languages spoken here.
> My Site is primarily in English, but my site targets different cities in INDIA.
> For Hyderabad - I want in Urdu & Telugu and for Chennai I want in Tamil
> for Bengaluru I want in Kannada.
> For North I want in Hindi.’

We’d like to introduce the transliteration API for Indic languages (languages spoken in India) in addition to our Ajax API for languages. With this API at your disposal, content creation is simplified because it not only helps integrating transliteration in your websites but also allows users visiting your site to type in Indic languages.

To include the transliteration API, first you need the AJAX script.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></>

This script tag will load the google.load function, which lets you load the individual Google APIs. For loading Google Transliteration API, call to google.load looks like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
google.load("elements", "1", {
packages: "transliteration"
});
</script>

When it comes to targeting, don't forget to add meta tags in your local language. And for your questions, we have a new addition to our already existing communication channels like the webmaster help groups and webmaster tools (available in 26 languages!). We also have our own official Orkut webmaster community! Here users can share thoughts and discuss webmaster related issues.

Sign up for our Orkut community now and if you have any additional thoughts we'd love to hear about them.

Cheers,
Jayashree and Zareen, Search Quality Team, Google India