How important is having a website in the translation industry?

Ligia Dias Costa wrote:
Can anybody recomend me a website builder? I would like to have one and know nothing regarding this matter.
Ligia Dias Costa

ostom wrote:

Based on the discussions above and my own experience I have compiled 13 reasons why a translator needs his website running.

Website means to have your own website with a domain of your own, like www.yyyyyy.net

13. Please add your reason

[Edited at 2008-07-25 06:14]

vieleFragen wrote:

this has turned into an interesting thread, some of the responses I hadn't seen, yet!:-)

I've been learning about "the web" mostly about internet marketing (web analytics and search engine optimization) for (almost) 2 years, now as I want to work in that industry after college. And specialization (especially in a field you're passionate about) is always a good idea..so I've been looking into the 'language industry' and have also been wondering if translators need internet marketing, so-to-speak.

For most businesses search engine rankings are extremely useful, but for some they're almost useless - in some fields (I think lawyers would be such a profession) people dont go to search engines to find who they need, but they ask friends or people they know ("word-of-mouth").

And I've been wondering if search engine rankings were important/helpful to translators or not (or if translation was one of the industries, where nobody really goes to a search engine and types in 'french to English translator', but preferred to get recommendations from people they know or from industry sites such as proZ).

Maybe somebody of you knows someone who does have a website with decent traffic from google & co? who are getting a lot of clients that way? or is it useless to them?

thanks!




P.S.: I think somebody used the word 'SEO'ers' in a negative way..or well not in a negative way but in the same phrase with spammers. Many people think 'SEO' is something bad and that they are trying to 'trick' the search engines, but search engine optimization is an absolutely legit profession, but of course there are alwaysa few bad people...

I feel it's similar to the translation industry. Imagine some people work with translators who sell their services for 1 cent/ word and thus produce bad quality (nobody's going to deliver great translation services for that rate, right?) translations. In the end those people will think "translators are all bad. they all suck!", when it's definitely not true for all translators!

Something similar happened to SEO, because people calling themselves SEOs would call up small companies and sell them "search engine listings" - they often offer to list them in 700 directories and place them at 180 different search engines and charge 500 bucks (random example) for it.

However, the problem with this is that Google has like 70% of the search volume (in Germany and other European countries it's over 90%..). And Google, Yahoo and MSN have like...not sure what the exact stats are right now, but it's VERY close to a 100 percent...so being listed at a million search engines won't help the business owner if these search engines don't send any traffic....after all those fly-by-night SEOs only promised to 'list' their sites, not to get them a high ranking (and like somebody said anything, but a top10..or top20 ranking is usually worthless).

So that's a common scheme that gives the 'SEO' industry a black eye when it doesn't deserve it, at all. It's very similar if somebody said 'translators all suck, they just deliver bad quality work' when that's only true for a subset of translators.