Hreflang Tags: What, Why, & How to Implement for Multilingual SEO?

Also, if you fail to optimize your site for multilingual SEO, you risk French-speaking users never finding your French site and navigating to your English one. For example, suppose your website content is very similar on multiple pages. In that case, those pages will all compete against one another and consequently harm each other’s rankings in the process. As such, multilingual SEO refers to optimizing your website’s SEO for a different language. Master this, and you massively increase the likelihood of your site being found by relevant visitors in other countries. The French translation obviously has a significantly lower search volume than the English version.

• Let multilingual SEO be your guide to reaching new heights and achieving international success.
• As the Senior General Manager of SEO, his expertise expands to various verticals, especially executing industry-specific SEO strategies for BFSI, Healthcare, and Education.
• However, when I first started working with them, they had an entirely Flash-based website, with an HTML version served to search engines.
• Just don’t forget to include multilingual markup in your strategy, it was, after all, designed by Google.
• Therefore, a high-quality multilingual site can offer potential customers a sense of familiarity so that you can gain their trust.

Target Languages: Defining Your Audience

For the final bit of optimization, you’ll want to SEO translate your slugs. Once you’ve installed both plugins, go to Settings → TranslatePress → License to activate your license key (which you can also get from your TranslatePress account dashboard). According to Google Search Central, Google looks negatively at “Text translated by an automated tool without human review or curation before publishing”. If you want to learn more, we have a whole post on website localization.

Use keywords that are relevant in other languages

To fix this, you’ll need to adjust the URL in the hreflang tag to reflect the new canonical webpage. Using this method, you can add all of your relevant tags in one file instead of manually adding link attributes to the HTML of every webpage. In addition, if you want to create alternate pages for .pdf files without HTML, you’ll need to implement the same tags in the HTTP header of each page. Again, think of large-scale ecommerce sites and what they go through daily trying to add new products for customers across the globe. In our pursuit of optimizing user intent and experience, writing content for different geographic locations and languages provides tremendous value to our website. These people were supposed to be moving into research and action toward admission.

Translate Page and Post URL Slugs

Sometimes, localizing specific sections like the homepage, contact information, and footer may suffice. To communicate effectively with a global audience, break down language barriers, and ensure your message is both understood and appreciated. Sure, you might get lucky and have your translations fit perfectly on the page. But you also might end up with some awkward situations where the translated text takes up an extra line and it looks weird. By default, Weglot adds a floating language switcher in the bottom-right corner of your website that includes both a flag and the language name. The even better news is that all the functionalities we’ve just discussed are available on the Weglot free plan. It’s technically challenging and time-consuming from an SEO perspective. However, it gives you the ability to use localized hosting, which can improve page load times. Maria Nikishyna is an accomplished search engine marketer specializing in paid and organic lead gen programs. By default, translation will open WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor. Every purchase of WPML comes with enough free credits to translate most WordPress sites without additional costs. Then to review your automatic translation, or add manual translations, Go to Translate, next to your language.  source Wix Multilingual helps you take your clients’ content even further–literally. With this one app, you can choose from 180 languages to localize an entire site and speak to audiences anywhere. To get started and create your multilingual WordPress site, install the free version from WordPress.org and start translating. You can also see the floating language switcher that TranslatePress automatically adds. But you may also need to consider search engines commonly used in your target markets. To reach the largest audience in your target market, follow SEO best practices for the most popular search engine in the region. Creating a multilingual WordPress site is great for your site’s SEO and user experience. You’ll be able to reach new visitors in Google search and let your multilingual audience browse your site in their preferred languages. Your translations will be fully indexable by Google and shareable on social media.