Discover how hreflang tags boost your international SEO and improve user experience by helping search engines index multilingual content. Learn the benefits and easy implementation with Localize’s automated solutions.
After you translate and publish your website in different languages, what’s next?
We recommend you focus on SEO to ensure search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu will index your site in specific languages.
Hreflang tags help boost your international SEO to make your content discoverable all over the world.
One of the best practices for getting search engines to index your content in other languages is to add hreflang tags to all of your pages.
Hreflang tags are bits of HTML code that tell a search engine what language your content is available in. For example, this bit of code would tell Google that there’s a French version of your web page available.
Example hreflang tag:
Here's what it means:
Example search results:
Search engines use your site’s hreflang attribute to organize the list of sites on the search engine results page (SERP). Here’s an example.
If you search Google for IKEA in the US, you’ll get this result for the IKEA homepage written in American English (EN-US):
If you search Google for IKEA when you’re in Germany, you’ll get this result with the German-language version:
In these examples, DE stands for Deutschland (Germany) and US stands for The United States. Most businesses use standardized language codes (ISO 639-1)or country codes (ISO 3166-1) to denote the language or the region of their website.
To build an hreflang tag Look up the two-letter ISO 639-1 language code for your preferred language, and fill in the tag. We recommend placing Hreflang tags in the HTTP header of your site.
Let’s build a tag for the German version of the Localize website: https://de.localizejs.com.
Targeting German Speakers:
Let’s say we wanted to target people in a specific region or country. To do this, we can use ISO 3166–1 alpha‑2 format in our hreflang tags. For example:
Targeting English Speakers in Australia
Targeting English Speakers in England
Constructing and managing hreflang tags is simple with Localize. Localize's cutting-edge translation software makes international SEO easy and automatic.
We’ll help you add hreflang tags to every page on your site automatically so your content is discoverable in any language. It’s as simple as filling in a brief form on your SEO Language Settings page:
To learn more about Localize, contact us today!
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