Internationalization

International SEO - optimizing multilingual sites and hreflang tags

📖 Detailed description

International SEO is the process of optimizing a site for search engines across different countries and languages. The key to success is the correct implementation of hreflang attributes.

These tags tell Google which language version of a page should be shown to a user based on their location and language settings. They prevent the problem of duplicate content between different language versions.

Equally important is correct character encoding (UTF-8), which ensures that diacritical marks display properly across all supported languages.

Most common problems

No character encoding

Strange characters appear instead of letters (mojibake)

No hreflang tags

Google does not know which language version to show

Incorrect language codes

Using "en-UK" instead of "en-GB"

No language declaration

The browser does not know which dictionary to use

How to fix it?

Set UTF-8 encoding in the head section

Use hreflang tags for every language version

Define Content-Language in your headers

Use correct ISO codes for countries and languages

Examples

Good example

Bad example

No information about language versions on a multilingual site

🔗 Related indicators

📝

Meta tags (Title and Description)

Optimizing your Title and Description - the key to a higher CTR and better Google rankings

📚

Heading structure (H1-H6)

Like a well-organized book - with chapters and subsections

🏗️

Structured data (Schema.org)

A special language you use to tell Google about your business

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