How Can Hreflang Tags Affect Technical SEO? 

Hreflang tags are an important part of a multilingual website that will help you optimize for your target audience and get the results you want. They are a must-have for any business with global customers and can be used to increase your organic search engine ranking by helping Google serve the correct content to people searching for your products or services in their native language. Contact us to learn more about gilbertseo.net

How can hreflang tags affect technical SEO? 

As a general rule, hreflang tags are not guaranteed to influence the rankings of your pages. However, implementing them can boost your page’s visibility and help you rank higher in search engines, especially for keywords with local intent. 

If you are new to hreflang, you should know that a lot of confusion exists about its implementation and how it affects search engine ranking. It is often viewed as a complex technology that requires a great deal of manual input, but the truth is, it is quite simple to implement and can be done by anyone with basic HTML skills. 

One of the first things you should do is to ensure that your web pages are aware of their translation equivalents, which can make a big difference when deploying hreflang. You should also be sure that all of your URLs are mapped correctly to all of the languages you intend to serve in hreflang tag form. 

Another key element to ensuring that hreflang works effectively is to ensure that you don’t use relative URLs for your hreflang URLs. This can cause confusion in the eyes of search engines and can potentially lead to duplicate content being served by your hreflang URLs. 

It is also a good idea to have alternate hreflang URLs in your site’s navigation so that people can easily find them. Using this approach, you will be able to make it easier for your customers to find the right version of your content to fit their needs and budget. 

The hreflang code can be added to your web pages by placing it in the HTML head> tag of each page. This will tell search engines that you have multiple versions of a particular page in a specific language and will allow them to swap them out as needed. 

In this way, hreflang tags can help you get better search engine rankings for a range of different languages, and they don’t have to be time-consuming to add or maintain. They are an important component of any multilingual SEO strategy and can have a huge impact on how you perform in search engine results pages (SERPs). 

You should always use the public domain address to map your hreflang URLs, and never try to create custom.com URLs unless you are targeting the US. This will confuse search engines, who are likely to see these as duplicate pages and could even lead to you being penalized by Google. 

Using a simple Google Sheets template can help you to set up your hreflang tags. You can then copy the template and edit it to suit your own needs.