Blog: How to Set Multilingual Website Localization for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

2024-09-10

Are you planning to support multiple languages for your website? Then read on to know the best practices as a web developer.

1) Make your site easy to be crawled by search engines

An easy way is to have a subfolder for each language. For example:

English: https://www.d2soft.com/en
French: https://www.d2soft.com/fr

Note that to make things cleaner and eliminate duplicate content, automatically redirect the root domain (www.d2soft.com) to your default language (www.d2soft.com/en).

2) For each page, implement the hreflang and language tags

For example, accessing the page https://www.d2soft.com/en/Blog generates the following header details:

<html lang="en">
<head>
<!-- ... -->
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.d2soft.com/en/Blog" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://www.d2soft.com/fr/Blog" />
<meta name="language" content="en" />
<!-- ... -->
</head>

Google recommends that for each page, you list all translations by using multiple hreflang tags, even one for the currently accessed page. This will build links between your content. Also good to specify the meta language tag of the current language. Finally, notice the use of the lang property with the HTML tag.

3) Understand the benefits

Google undertsands better the relation between the pages;
search engines discover new URLs;
gives a more targeted result to users.

4) Other best practices:

create shareable URLs: URL must always give the same content;
do not use language as an URL parameters (do not do: www.d2soft.com/?lang=fr);
use UTF-8 encoding for URLs that have unicode characters (like "vélo" --> "v%C3%A9lo").

5) More information:

If you want to know more, you can watch this video from Google:

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