What Is Hreflang?
The hreflang is an HTML attribute that you can use to specify the language of a webpage, as well as its geographical location. Those who use it are commonly websites with multiple versions in different languages, as the hreflang attribute points out the differences between pages that are extremely similar in what they mean but are just targeted to other regions. This tells Google and other search engines which version of your website they need to present to specific audiences around the world.
Google uses this information to ensure they deliver your website’s right version to the right audience. It ensures that the French version of your website doesn’t show up to UK audiences and vice versa. You don’t want to find your target audience clicking back off your site simply because the wrong version of it was shown to them. They may only think you are a French business and don’t serve them. You may even need to use it if you have content that is in English but is targeted at different geographic locations.
Adding the hreflang tag will massively help your global SEO. It can also ensure you don’t face potential penalties. Google doesn’t like duplicate content, and if you don’t specify that it is for a different audience somewhere else in the world with a hreflang tag, you risk getting penalised. Furthermore, you can localise your content to specific regions, which allows you to create a better user experience (something Google is constantly looking to do for their users). You should be rewarded with better rankings if you can create a better user experience. However, hreflang tags can directly influence rankings regardless of your user experience because pages within a hreflang cluster share each other’s ranking signals, meaning they could help boost one another up.
Within your hreflang tag, you need to specify which primary language the content is in so that Google can return the search results audiences are seeking in the language they understand and is most appropriate for them. However, you don’t write out English, Spanish, French, and so on. Instead, you use the lang attributes. For English, this would be “en”, Spanish is “es”, and French is “fr”. This displays like this: <html lang=”en”>. However, if you would like to specify the difference between your English US content and your English UK content, you could add “en-gb” for Great Britain.
A hreflang tag may seem scary to look at initially, but when broken down, it is quite easy to understand. This is what it should look like: <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”fr” href=Add your URL here. The first part, link rel=”alternate”, signifies there is another version of a particular page. The hreflang=”fr” details that this is the language of the content, and the href= is where you can enter the URL of the content’s location.