DETAILS
I have a website with content in English. It is a niche website with a global market. However I would like users to be able to find the website using their own language. The scenario I envision is that the searcher is looking for the English content, but is searching in their own language. An example could be someone looking for "downloadable English crosswords."
MY IDEAS
Buy ccTLDs and have them permanently redirect to subdirectories on example.com
.
The subdirectories would contain HTML sitemaps in the target language e.g. -Redirect example.fr
to example.com/fr
OR
perhaps it would be better to maintain example.fr
as an
independent site in the target language with the html sitemap linking to pages on example.com
?
QUESTION
Are the above methods good/bad? What are some other ways I can optimize SEO for foreign languages?