What is Multilingual SEO?
Multilingual SEO is basically an act of optimizing your website’s content for different languages so that you become searchable in new markets and people in different countries can easily find your website through organic search. Herein, you need to ensure mainly two things – people are seeing the right pages for their location and that there is no duplicate content across your website. Furthermore, you can follow the best practices that Google has laid out to help you improve your rankings.Expert tips to optimize your multilingual website
In this section, we’ll take you through four tips to optimize your multilingual website –1. Use dedicated URLs
One of the main problems one might face with multilingual websites is duplicate content. While not all duplicate content is detrimental, the same content appearing within multiple URLs may lead to penalties such as lowered ranking or deindexing. To avoid this, you can use dedicated URLs that include a language indicator. The indicator enables search engines as well as users to identify the language from the URL itself. For example – an original page may be www.example.com, while the German version could be www.example.com/de, the French version could be www.example.com/fr/and so on. The placement of the language indicator in the URL will depend on the URL structure you choose. You can use a ccTLD (country code Top Level Domain), subdomain or subdirectory. For better clarity, we’ve given examples for all three of them –- ccTLD (e.g. www.example.fr)
- Subdomain (e.g. www.fr.example.com)
- Subdirectory (e.g. www.example.com/fr/)
2. Apply hreflang tags
Apart from the language indicators, Google also uses hreflang attributes to help determine the language of the page and the region for which it is intended. These tags can be inserted in the original page’s header section or submitted via a sitemap. For instance, an hreflang tag referencing a French page intended for the readers in Canada could look like – <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”fr-ca” href=”http://example.com/fr/” /> If any page is intended for multiple regions, you can add multiple hreflang attributes too. The whole process may be a little complicated and time-consuming but is highly advantageous.3. Stick to one language per page
You may want to translate some areas of a web page while keeping other parts in the original language. A couple of instances where a page may have multiple languages are –- The main content is translated, but the navigation text is in the original language
- User-generated content (such as comments and forum discussions) is in different languages
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