Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) For The Hispanic Market

We have noticed that there are quite a few articles on the subject of having your website in other languages when you directly translate your web content to another language, whether this is considered duplicate content or not. Yet we were having a bit of a hard time finding anything (in English) as to developing an optimized website in Spanish for the Hispanic Community here in The US. When we say optimized website, we were talking about on-page Search Engine Optimization that involves keyword research, competitive analysis, as well as off-page SEO as to getting links from high ranking sites, etc.

So we decided to take out our handy dandy SEO Spyglass and plugged in some keywords related to business sectors such as employment, business, etc that we wanted to see who the competitors are, what keyword variations we can use, where all these competitors are getting their links from, find out where the high ranking sites are…

Even though we have an American IP, most of the major sites appeared from overseas or from other countries within the continent. This tells us that the Hispanic Internet Market in America is not (yet) competitive or authority enough to show in the first pages of the search engines (please note that it is impossible to test every market, we only tested a few keywords).

Besides all the above research, we also wanted to look into regular link building strategy as in article marketing, online video marketing, press release writing and distribution, Web 2.0.

After some research, we found out that article marketing (specifically for link building purposes) is not a big task as we were afraid of. We have found quite many article directories solely in Spanish as high as PR6, and we wanted to share some of our findings below (please keep in mind that we didn’t check if these directories are located in The US or not):

• Suite101.net
• Go Articles
• Squidoo (comment from Squidoo “… so we don’t technically prevent non-English lenses from being developed and published here…”)
• Traficologia
• ArticulosYa.com
• ArticuloZ
• Directorio De Articulo
• Yugler.com Directorio de Artículos
• Buscador de Artículos
• doblenucleo.com
• Articulosgratis.com
• Articulandia
• Elatinozine
• Ocio Directory
• Super Articulos
• Spanish Language Directory List (this article lists plenty of them but we are not sure if any of them are updated or not)

When we looked around for online video marketing, we have found quite a few video sites, but they mostly didn’t give out live links. So we decided to stick with the two that just about everybody knows the most; YouTube and Vimeo (even though they are no-follow sites, click-through is always a good thing!).

The most intriguing result was the press release distribution services in Spanish. To our surprise, as many Hispanics live in this country, there are not that many Hispanic press release distribution sites. Following is the list that we wanted to share:

• Contacto PR News
• Hispanic Digital Network
• Rush PR
• PR News Channel
• Logos PR

…and this is one of the candid emails that we have received from one of the prominent press release distribution sites:

Hello
sorry, 99% of US media want news in English.
We only send news in English.

We do send to Latino oriented publications and media outlets in the U.S.

Thanks for your query.

So the bottom line is;

• There are many article directories in Spanish.
• You can do press releases, even though there are not that many distribution options as in English.
• You can always build your own blog(s) in Web 2.0 sites to get some links from (… without playing games please – such as link-wheels, etc!)
• You can always upload videos. Furthermore, you can even take this opportunity to come up with a nice online video marketing strategy!)
• We are not sure if guess blogging even exists in this medium at the moment?
• When it comes to keywords research, competitive analysis, building an optimized website, it seems like it is pretty much open market. With a well-thought Internet Marketing Strategy, and a nicely planned SEO program, you shouldn’t have much of a problem ranking higher (… again, depending on how competitive your market is and how competitive your keywords are).

Do you have any other ideas or experiences in this matter? Please do share it with everybody…