Now that you know some of the common problems that arise, it’s time to fix them with the following tips.
1. Use a consistent URL structure.
Maintaining a consistent URL structure is essential to organizing your multilingual website. Search engines use URLs to categorize and index the different language versions of your site. A clear structure helps ensure that users are algeria phone number data served the correct version of the page based on their language or location, improving both user experience and SEO.
Depending on your needs, you can choose individual domains (ccTLDs), subdirectories or subdomains. For example:
ccTLDs: If you are targeting a specific region, use country code top-level domains, such as example.com for the English version and example.es for the Spanish version. This signals to search engines that these are separate regional pages. Example:
English version:
Spanish version:
Subdirectories: This method allows you controlling the tone of communication to keep everything on one domain. For example, example.com/en and example.com/es for the English and Spanish versions, respectively. This approach is cost-effective and easier to manage, especially if SEO resources are focused on one domain. Example:
- English version:
- Spanish version: While this setup may consumer data seem more localized, it can complicate SEO efforts because each subdomain requires independent SEO strategies. Example:
English version:
Spanish version:
2. Manage content with hreflang and canonical tags.
Implementing hreflang and canonical tags ensures that search engines display the correct language version of your pages to users, preventing duplicate content issues. Hreflang tags specify the language and regional version of a page, helping search engines determine which version to show based on the user’s location.
Here is the implementation of the hreflang tag. As you can see, this site offers options for different languages. So each article uploaded has an hreflang tag that links to all available language options.