Learn Hreflang Best Practices for Global SEO
In a global market, your website’s content needs to speak to your audience in their own language. The hreflang attribute is a vital HTML tag that tells search engines which language and/or country your content is intended for. For any business with an international audience, using hreflang is essential for ensuring the right version of your content appears in search results, regardless of where your users are located.
Effective SEO isn’t just for your English website; it’s for every language and regional version. Proper hreflang implementation is a key part of that strategy.
What is Hreflang?
Hreflang is an HTML attribute that signals to search engines like Google which language and region a specific web page is intended for. This prevents issues with duplicate content and ensures a user in Spain sees your Spanish website, while a user in Japan sees the Japanese version.
By providing location-specific content, you improve the user experience, which helps build brand trust and loyalty. This makes it easier for international customers to find your products and services, navigate your website, and ultimately make a purchase.
Hreflang’s 5 Core SEO Benefits
Correctly using the hreflang attribute provides several essential SEO benefits:
- Improves User Experience: Delivers the most relevant content in the correct language and location, leading to higher engagement and longer dwell times.
- Mitigates Duplicate Content Issues: Signals to search engines that similar pages are intentional language or regional variations, preventing them from being seen as duplicate content.
- Builds Authority: Helps establish your website as the most relevant and authoritative domain for your content, regardless of language.
- Boosts Rankings in Local SERPs: Ensures your content is found and ranked in the correct regional search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Supports E-E-A-T: By providing a better user experience and building authority,
hreflangindirectly contributes to your website’s overall Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
Hreflang Implementation: A Step-by-Step Guide
Implementing hreflang can be complex, and errors can confuse search engines. Here’s a high-level overview of the process.
1. Determine Your Target Languages and Countries Before you begin, use your analytics to identify where your international traffic is coming from. Understand the user behavior, language preferences, and cultural nuances of each target audience. This research should guide which language and regional pages you create.
2. Create Bidirectional Hreflang Tags Hreflang works in pairs. If you add an hreflang tag on your English page pointing to a German version, you must add a corresponding tag on the German page pointing back to the English one. This bidirectional tagging confirms the relationship between the pages and prevents search engine errors.
3. Decide Where to Place the Tags The hreflang attribute can be added in three locations, but you should only choose one for consistency:
- HTML Page Header: Insert the
<link>tag within the<head>section of your HTML page. - HTTP Header: For non-HTML files (like PDFs), you can use the HTTP header.
- XML Sitemap: This is often the cleanest and most scalable method, especially for large websites. You can add the
hreflangattributes directly to your sitemap.
4. Use Correct Language and Region Codes The hreflang attribute requires the correct formatting for language and optional region codes. Language codes should be formatted using ISO 639-1, while region codes use ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2.
For example:
hreflang="es"(Spanish, for all regions)hreflang="en-gb"(English, for Great Britain)hreflang="x-default"(a general fallback page for all other languages or regions)
Hreflang Best Practices
- Be Consistent: Use your chosen implementation method across your entire website.
- Use x-default: Implement an
x-defaulttag to tell Google which page to serve when a user’s language or region does not match any of your specifichreflangtags. This is often the homepage or a language selection page. - Avoid Redirects: Your
hreflangtags should point to a 200 OK page, not a redirect. - Bidirectional Linking: Always use
hreflangtags in pairs to confirm the relationship between pages.
While hreflang is a technical detail, getting it right is fundamental for global SEO. It helps you avoid duplicate content issues and signals to search engines that you are providing a high-quality, relevant experience to users worldwide. For this reason, we recommend using a professional to ensure your translated content is accurate and culturally relevant, and that all of your technical SEO is correctly implemented.
