How and Why to Implement Hreflang-data on Multilingual or Multi-regional websites

Do you have versions of your site targeted different languages or regions? If you do you should pay attention to this post. It will help you gain much more search visibility and secure that the search users end up on the right version of your website.

See great video below …

What is Hreflang?

Hreflang is a standard used on websites in multiple languages, or targeted multiple regions.

Why use Hreflang?

No matter what platform and structure you use, a very important element to add is Hreflang-data!

• With Hreflang you can help the search engines show the right version of your site to the right search users. This cn help increase conversions/sales dramatically
• Hreflang-data will prevent duplicate content filtering and the SEO problems this can lead to
• Also, by clustering your different language/regional pages you will transfer authority from the strong to the weaker (or newer) versions. This will make it more likely that they all rank well

How to implement Hreflang-data

Implementing Hreflang-data is not as easy as it may sound. Very often mistakes are made and that can really hurt your SEO.

Some of the most common mistakes are:

• Missing return links
  If page X links to page Y, page Y must link back to page X. If this is not the case for all pages that use hreflang annotations, those annotations may be ignored or not interpreted correctly.
• Links to dead (404) or redirected pages
  You should only include links in your Hreflang data to active and functional pages.
• Incorrect language codes
  Make sure that all language codes you use identify the language (in ISO 639-1 format) and optionally the region (in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format) of an alternate URL. Specifying the region alone is not valid.

Hreflang video – expert interview

I just did an interview with one of my good friends – and one of the worlds leading experts in Hreflang – Bill Hunt.

In the video we will talk about some of the many mistakes that are often made and how to prevent it.

Watch this video, if you want to know more about Hreflang, multilingual sites and SEO …