With the rise of global businesses and e-commerce shopping, many companies are expanding their websites to reach an international audience. While it’s important to translate your content into multiple languages to accommodate your audience, it’s equally crucial to configure the correct requirement for multilingual web pages. One way to achieve this is through the use of hreflang tags, which help search engines display the most relevant languages and regional content for your site.
What Are Hreflang Tags?
Hreflang tags are used to define the language and region (such as France or Canada) of a webpage. When implemented, search engines read the tags and display the appropriate version of the page to users. If your site offers the same content in multiple languages, hreflang tags ensure that search engine users find the content that’s most relevant to their region.
Why Are Hreflang Tags important?
Hreflang tags are crucial for multilingual sites for several reasons. Firstly, search engines will only rank your site for a particular region or language if the hreflang tags are set up correctly. Without them, search engines may not be able to correctly identify which language and/ or region a page is meant for. This can result in lower search engine ranks for the website, impacting its visibility and affecting the conversion rate as well as profitability in the long run.
Secondly, if search engines find duplicate content on the site, the ranking algorithm might demote the site. By using hreflang tags correctly, you can avoid any potential problems with duplicate content.
Finally, hreflang tags can also improve user experience, ensuring that your site visitors instantaneously see the webpage in their language and region – an essential element for an excellent user experience.
How to Implement Hreflang Tags
Hreflang tags can be added to the code of the webpages to inform search engines about the alternative versions of the site. When creating a multilingual website, all different language versions should be linked with the correct hreflang tags accordingly. For the primary version of the page, the hreflang attribute should be used on the ‘rel=canonical’ tag. Subsequently, the alternate versions of the page should reference the primary version through the implementation of the ‘href’ language prefix.
Specifying Language
Language should be specified in the ‘hreflang’ attribute in the format of [ISO 639-1 language code]-[ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 country code]. The language code represents a two-letter language code for the particular language and the country code refers to the 2 letter country abbreviation. For example, the tag for Spanish in Spain is hreflang=”es-es”. If the content is intended for the US, the tag would be hreflang=”es-us”.
Profile Value
Additionally, the ‘x-default’ attribute should be set up to indicate the default page which should be displayed if the user’s locale hasn’t been specified. For example, <link rel=”alternate” href=”http://www.example.com/en-de/” hreflang=”en-de” x-default>.
Site Map File
In addition to adding hreflang attributes to the web page code, it’s also recommended to include them in the XML sitemap file using the ‘hreflang’ tag in the header. This will help search engines to locate and navigate through all the alternate language versions of the website with ease.
Conclusion
Hreflang tags are essential for multilingual web pages to improve search engine rankings, avoid duplicate content issues, and ensure that users see the appropriate content. Understanding how these tags are used and how to implement them is crucial for success of multilingual sites. By following the recommended best practices, you can ensure that search engines display the most appropriate content for your audience. With the right hrefs, your website will have a better chance of reaching the target audience and offering a great user experience.