Understanding Hreflang Tags: Why they are important for your website and How to add them

As we all know, the internet has made the world a smaller place by providing a platform for businesses to reach out to customers globally. However, the same can create issues, especially when language and regional barriers come into play. This is where Hreflang tags come in to play. A Hreflang tag is a piece of HTML code that tells search engines the language and region of a page on your site. This helps search engines detect the right version of your website to show to users from a particular region. In this blog post, we will discuss the importance of Hreflang tags for your website and how to add them.

Why are Hreflang tags important?

Search engines have several ranking algorithms that determine which pages to show in the search results. Hreflang tags help search engines display the appropriate content to users who speak a particular language or come from a specific location. By using Hreflang tags, your website will be optimized for international SEO, leading to better visibility in search engines. Also, by adding Hreflang tags to your website, users will be assured that they are viewing the right version of the website, which enhances the user experience.

How to add Hreflang tags to your website?

Adding Hreflang tags to your website is a relatively straightforward process. You can either use the HTML header or the HTML body of a page to include the relevant Hreflang code. The Hreflang code comes in the form of “link” HTML tags, and each tag contains language and region codes. Besides, you need to define the primary language version and the alternate language versions for each page. Once you have added the Hreflang tags to your website, we suggest testing them with Google’s Search Console’s Hreflang checker tool. This tool checks for errors and will help you ensure your tags are set properly.

Hreflang tags and country-specific domains

If a company has specific country-specific domains, Hreflang tags can become complicated. If you have a company that owns domain extensions for each country, then you need to set up correspondingly international subdirectories for every regional and language version. Doing so will enable you to assign appropriate Hreflang tags to the relevant subdirectory pages of your website. This will help Google understand how the content of each webpage is to be displayed depending on the language and region of the user who searches for your website.

Hreflang tags and duplicate content

Hreflang tags can prevent duplicate content problems by assigning the proper language and locale to unique international and regional pages. But, you still need to ensure that all the pages have unique content because Hreflang tags won’t solve issues related to duplication of content and pages. Therefore, it is advisable to conduct regular site audits and remove any duplicate content on your website.

Hreflang tags play a crucial role in the optimization of international SEO. Implementing the appropriate Hreflang tags on your website pages is a relatively simple process. The tag enables Google to serve the correct version of your website to users from different regions. Now that you know how effective Hreflang tags are, ensure they are incorporated as part of your overall SEO strategy. By this, your website will rank high not only for one region but also globally.