Multilingual Website SEO: The Best Practices to Follow

It's easy to set up an SEO strategy for a website that targets only one language, but it gets harder when a website targets multiple languages.?

There are several best practices that you should consider if you want to get all your multilingual website pages indexed and better search engine visibility for your website.

Here I'm sharing the best SEO practices for multilingual websites.

1. A Unique URL for Each Language Page:

Duplicate content is a major issue with multilingual websites. If you are targeting multiple languages on your website, each language page should have its own unique and dedicated URL.

Example: www.example.fr is for the French language and www.example.en is for the English language.

2. Submit a Multilingual XML Sitemap:?

There are many tools to create XML sitemaps for single-language websites, but not for multi-language websites, so you need to create it manually. If you know of any SEO tool for creating?multilingual XML sitemaps, please let me know.

In the multilingual XML Sitemap, we need to specify each language page.

How to create an XML sitemap for multilingual websites is another topic we will talk about later, but if you want to know now, you can read this Google guide on multilingual website SEO.

3. Make use of Hreflang Tags:

The Hreflang tag goes in the header of the original page of your website.

Here's an example of the hreflang tag. This hreflang tag on the English version of the page references the German version page.

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example,com/de/" /> (comma used on place of . in URL)

4. Use Only One Language Per Page:

If your web page is in German, make sure that all of the content, including navigation, header, and footer, is in German as well, so always use only one language on the page.

5. Meta Tags:

Ensure that your meta tags are also translated into the language for which your webpage is intended. Many websites make this mistake, and they avoid translating metadata.

So that's all for today. I have tried to keep the content short this time. I hope you have learned something new with this.

On YouTube, you can also watch my SEO tutorial videos in Hindi.

Thank you!