Hreflang and International SEO: position in other languages

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Do you want to position your website in search engines in other countries? In addition to doing good SEO, you must take into account a very important factor: Hreflang attributes. What is hreflang and how should you use it? Alex Serrano tells you!


Table of contents
What is hreflang
Before implementing the hreflang
Information about websites with different language versions

What is hreflang?
This attribute or markup is what you should use to notify Google that you france email list have an international website or that certain pages have another language version , this way Google knows exactly where to display it, depending on the language of each country.

Correct implementation of the hreflang tag will allow the correct results to be displayed by country and language, which will increase the chances of positioning a website in other countries.

The hreflang tag is included in the website code and should be used in several cases. For example, if the main content of your website is in a single language and only the template is translated, when your website is in languages ​​with regional variations (English in Great Britain, the United States, Canada or Australia) and when a website is fully translated into another language or languages.

A hreflang tag typically looks like this:

hreflag tag.png


An important part of this attribute is the language and country codes . Incorrect indication of these can render the hreflang attribute useless.

In order, the first in the example case is 'ES', this is the language code and must always appear first. This code is set by ISO 639-1 and the second code, corresponding to the region, by ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2. The latter indicates the country in which the content is to be displayed and, unlike the language code, is optional.

Ultimately, poor implementation of the hreflang tag or its absence can cause problems in your international SEO strategy .

hreflang asos.pngExample of hreflang implementation on Asos.com

This Google article explains how to add this attribute to your website's HTML code. If you have your website built on Wordpress, you can use a great plugin like WPML . If you use Prestashop, you can use this other one .



Before implementing the hreflang
- Content translation: before implementing hreflang, your website must be prepared to offer the appropriate content for each language and region. The content and all the sections that you want to be displayed in another language depending on where it is accessed must be correctly translated. Trust professionals, use translators and avoid automatic translators... Have you ever seen what happens on Aliexpress?

- Keyword research: It is important that when translating content, it is not done literally, and that you also take into account something very important: the keywords for each country . It is not only the language that changes, in each country we search differently and we call things in different ways. Do a thorough keyword study focused on each country and language. Use SEO tools such as Sistrix, SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner.