What are Hreflang Tags and How to Use them in WordPress

If you’re looking to go viral and reach a worldwide audience, it might be a good idea to have a website that supports multiple languages. Even though English has become a global lingua franca of the modern age, there are still many people who prefer to browse websites written in their native language.

This is where hreflang tags come into play. Thanks to them, Google can display a page in the search results in the user’s preferred language.

In this summary, we’ll dive deeper into hreflang tags and answer the following questions:

What Are Hreflang Tags?

Hreflang is an HTML meta tag that determines the language and geographic location of a page.. It tells Google that a website has different versions for users from different countries and speak different languages, and the search engine should display pages accordingly.

For example, a hreflang tag will instruct Google to show one page for Italian speakers in Italy and a different page for English speakers in the UK. This feature is particularly useful if you want to target a specific audience with specific products or services.

This is what the hreflang tags look like in action. First, we got the best result for Italian users who want to visit MTV’s website:

And when an English speaker from the UK googles MTV, the first result they’ll see is this:

All of this is possible thanks to hreflang tags. Them Have Google direct users to the most appropriate version of a website based on language preferences, search criteria, and regions.

When Should You Use Hreflang Tags?

While we mentioned the most obvious case where hreflang tags need to be implemented (when your site is international and translated into multiple languages), you should also consider using them in any of the following scenarios:

Where Should You Put Hreflang Tags?

There is Three ways to tell Google that a page has multiple language versions. You can use hreflang tags in:

Let’s examine each of these methods separately.

1. How to Implement Hreflang in HTML Tags

To begin with, we’ll show you what an hreflang tag looks like:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="lang_code" href="https://qodeinteractive.com/magazine/hreflang-tags-in-wordpress/url_of_page" />

This is the tag you should add to the title of your page to let Google know about the different language and/or local version versions of your page.

Now, let’s see what each part of this tag means:

2. How to Implement Hreflang Tags in HTTP Headers

This method is an excellent option when dealing with. Non-HTML files such as PDFs. But you can also use it with HTML pages.

In this case, the link will look like this:

; rel=”alternative”; hreflang=”lang_code_1″, ; rel=”alternative”; hreflang=”lang_code_2″, ; rel=”alternative”; hreflang=”lang_code_3″,… etc., depending on how many language or regional versions of a page you have.

3. How to Implement Hreflang Tags Using a Sitemap

Although this method may seem like the most complicated, it is quite useful as it allows you. Use a single file to notify Google about all languages ​​and regional versions of your page.

For this method you will need an attribute that specifies a URL, and to list all the language and region variants of your page.

Basically, this is what you need to enter:

<url>
<loc>url_of_page</loc>
<xhtml:link 
rel=”alternate” 
hreflang=”lang_code” 
href=”url_of_page_targeted_at_specific_language_speakers”/> 
</url>

Repeat this part for each language, just change the codes.

N.B. Google stated hreflang implementation guidelines for all methodsso whatever method you choose make sure you stick with them.

When Should You Use the Hreflang=”x-default” Tag?

owned by Google introduced the hreflang=”x-default” tag in 2013. The purpose is to indicate Which page should users see when there are no other language pages matching their preset criteria?. Setting this tag is not mandatory, but can be useful if a page doesn’t target a specific language or region (for example, homepages with a country selection option).

Can Hreflang Tags Affect SEO?

Hreflang tags are extremely important for your SEO.

they help reduce the chances of having seemingly duplicate content. With hreflang tags, Google will know that you are not running two copies of the same content. This is especially important if you have pages in one language for different markets with seemingly minor differences. For example, you may be running an English eCommerce website, but prices may be displayed in different currencies depending on the country.

Another benefit of using hreflang tags is great user experience and therefore lower bounce rates. The longer visitors stay on your page, the higher the chances of becoming leads and eventually converting.

How to Add Hreflang Tags to WordPress

The fastest and easiest way to add hreflang tags to WordPress is to use plugins.. You can make your website multilingual by using multilingual or hreflang plugins.

Multilingual plugins are the best solution when you aim to create a multilingual website. One of the most popular plugins of this type multilingual. It currently has over 500,000 active installs, is regularly updated, and has an average star rating of 4.7.

After installing the plugin you will be able to: choose which languages ​​to add to your website. You can choose as many of them as you want. You can also enable Polylang: translate text accompanying media filestitles, descriptions, etc. as. choose the language to use throughout incoming content without a language assigned.

Polylang also LingotekIt is an excellent translation management system.

Another excellent multilingual plugin you can use besides Polylang Weglot.

Weglot with an average rating of 4.8 stars automatically detects, translates (first layer of machine translation with full editing control) and displays your website content under language subdirectories. It also allows you to: edit and update your translations and even hire Weglot’s professional translators translate any content for you. This plugin also follows Google’s best practices for multilingual SEO, so hreflang tags are automatically added to your WordPress website for you.

Besides Polylang and Weglot, WPML and TanslatePress are two powerful plugins that will help you add hreflang tags to your site.

If you want to avoid using multilingual plugins, you can try: HREFLANG Stickers Lite Addition.

When activating the plugin, hreflang option will appear in your WordPress menu. Click on it to select the content types you want to set the hreflang meta boxes for. We wanted to add hreflang tags to our pages, so we checked the appropriate box. And now when we go Pages > Add New we have option to add hreflang tags for new page. All we have to do is paste the URL of the page we just made and select the language.

The professional version of this plugin provides more options such as: HTML Code Generator, Batch Editor (displays all your pages and posts in one place and lets you add hreflang tags to them) and Validation Toolthis allows you to test your hreflang tags.

Solution

For any entrepreneur with an international audience, hreflang tags are your friends. You can use them to provide a better user experience and present the content to your target audience in their own language. Adding them to WordPress is effortless thanks to powerful plugins. But if you decide to create them on your own, try to keep the following practices in mind:

Good luck!