At Click Intelligence, we don’t want anything to stand in the way of you reaching your full SERPs potential! That’s why we’ve created a nifty hreflang tags testing tool for you to check that your HTML and HTTP headers are correct. This is the only way to make sure that localised Google users see the version of your web page you want them to!
What is a Hreflang Tag?
Hreflang is a piece of HTML code used to indicate the geographical region and language of webpages with similar content. They are also commonly used to target markets that use the same language—for example, the UK and the US. As well as content with regional variations, the tags might be used to indicate content in different languages like German (de) or French (fr) and to let search engines know that content in different languages has regional variations.
Why Is It Important For SEO?
Getting hreflang right will benefit your SEO efforts. After all, that’s why we’ve created our handy hreflang checker so you can make sure yours are working properly!
If you’ve spent time and resources translating content into different languages and optimising it for different localities, then, of course, you want Google to show the user the most suitable version of your content.
When Google displays content that is focused on the right region and language, it gives the user experience a huge boost! This improves rankings and reduces your bounce rate as users are less likely to click back to the results pages to find an alternative resource.
Another advantage of using hreflang is that it means Google doesn’t class your similar content as duplicates. Google has a problem with duplicate content because it doesn’t know which URL should display in the SERPs, which can negatively affect rankings. So, if you want to stay in the search engine’s good books, you must use hreflang.
As an example, take content aimed at UK and US audiences. The differences between the 2 could be just a few spelling variations or differences in prices and currencies listed. If you’re not using hreflang, Google might consider the content duplicate and disregard it. When you use hreflang, you signal to Google that the content is similar, just optimized for different users.
When To Use Hrefelang Tags?
So, when should you use hreflang?
- Your webpage has the same content in different languages
- You have content in the same language aimed at different regions
What Does It Look Like?
Before running your URL through a hreflang check, you need to have the codes in place. To implement hreflang tags, you need to know what the code looks like and what values you need to add to it, so it performs the way you need it to.
Here is an example of what it looks like:
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” href=”https://example.com/alternate-page” />
- The first section, link rel=”alternate” signals that the link is an alternative version of the page
- The second, hreflang=”x” indicates the different language, ‘x’ is where the language code will be
- Finally, href=”https://example.com/alternate-page” signals that the alternative page can be found at this URL
To Target Language:
To write your own hreflang tag, you need to look up the code for your language and add it to the tag. This 2 letter code is known as ISO 639-1 language code. Commonly used language codes include:
- en for English
- de for German
- fr for French
- nl for Dutch
- it for Italian, and so on.
To Target Region:
As mentioned, hreflang tags can be used to target countries as well as languages. This 2 letter code is in a format called ISO 3166-1 alpha-2. It only needs to be used when you want to target people who speak a language in a specific country, hreflang=” language-country” when used in this way.
For English speakers in the UK, it would look like this:
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-uk” href=”https://example.com/uk/about” />
For English speakers in the US, it would look like this:
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-us” href=”https://example.com/us/about” />
How Do You Implement Hreflang Tags?
There are 3 ways to use href lang on your website.
- HTTP headers: These are for non-HTML content like PDF documents.
- HTML tags: To implement hreflang in HTML tags, add the above-mentioned code into the <head> section of each page.
- Sitemaps: You can also implement hreflang in your XML sitemap.
Our hreflang validator tool can check that your code is working in your HTML tags and HTTP headers only.
How Can Our Hreflang Testing Tool Help You?
Our hreflang tester is one of the best available online. It’s the ultimate checker that will make checking your hreflang tags easy.
It’s simple. Paste the URL of the webpage you want to check into the tool and let our clever software do the rest!
If you identify any issues, our friendly team of SEO experts is ready to help you fix anything that is holding your site back from reaching its full rankings potential!
