Is it a multi-lingual site, or simply a site in a non-English langauge?
If the latter, just apply the basic principles you already have.
If the former, I'd be looking to serve each language's content via unique URLs. So rather than having a single homepage at
http://www.mysite.com/...give each language its own homepage:
http://www.mysite.com/en/http://www.mysite.com/fr/http://www.mysite.com/de/http://www.mysite.com/it/etc.
This means that:
- each language has a 'default' landing page which you can optimise for as appropriate
- users can bookmark/link to pages in their respective language, without the need to select a language each visit
- you can more readily apply optimisation such as unique page descriptions, titles, define canonical URL structure and so on
- you can indicate the language for each specific URL in the lang="" attribrute
Most of the usual SEO practices apply. Just remember that you need to indicate to Google
et al what the language of the page is. Google will usually assign an entire site to a particular location; you may wish to mitigate this by having separate domains for each language (if appropriate - and this might be, if you're running with a non-brand english domain name).
You could alternatively opt for giving each language a sub-domain (e.g.
http://fr.mysite.com). Both approaches would let you set each language/country site preference in webmaster tools.
I'm not sure how that works with regards to the keywords and description meta-tags though.
Oh, PLEASE FORGET ABOUT META KEYWORDS! Won't do any SEO harm, but it's a complete waste of time.
