Visibility in Italian Search Engines

By Sante Achille

Visibility in Italian search engines is a matter of content, design and organization just as it is in the English-language engines. As Jill often points out to us, the better your content is, the more targeted traffic your Web site will generate.

If you believe your business could use a local presence in Europe, in particular in Italy, then the first thing you will have to do is set up some pages in Italian. This is the most important phase of the
project: you'll need to be sure that whoever is doing the translation for you is fluent in Italian (or any other language, for that matter, if you are looking at local presence in other European countries).

The translating will have to take into account the Web site content, the existing keywords, the building of new pages that reflect the Italian way of approaching the Web, while also the targeting the English equivalent of your keywords to achieve top positioning on major Italian search engines.

Once you have found the right person to perform the translation for you, make sure they carefully read your Web pages to fully understand all aspects of your business and what your objectives are. You'll then have to go through the process of building your Web site once again, so this step is important.

Your translator should look up typical Italian keyword searches using the following tools:

The Italian Overture tool: <http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/?mkt=it>.
The Espotting keyword search tool: <http://it.espotting.com/popups/keywordgenbox.asp>.

This way it is possible to fine-tune your keywords and embed them into the translation.

As for the search engines themselves, there are two major players in
Italy: Virgilio <http://www.virgilio.it> and Arianna <http://arianna.iol.it/>.

There are more details about these two very important Italian search engines on my site here: <http://www.web-ranking.it/Documents/search-engines-italy.htm>.

You can see how results from different databases blend using this complete map of the relations between the search engines at MotoriDiRicerca.IT <http://www.motoridiricerca.it/mappa-motori.htm>.

Just like on your side of the Atlantic, be prepared to spend a few bucks on pay-per-submission and directory registrations.

Sante Achille
CEO, SINTESI Sas
http://web-ranking.it