In the last chapter, we looked at how things like server location and how you handle your domains, subdomains, and URL structure can provide search engines with additional cues to help discover what languages or countries your site is targeting. And we even mentioned that there are some features in Webmaster Tools that you can take advantage of as well. We saw that if you're targeting multiple languages, you'll want to help search engines as much as you can by making sure your content is fully translated, and make sure to include navigational and core site functions in that localization process.
Now, we're going to spend a little time looking in a little more detail at how search engines view these things and more. First, search engines are really, really interested in making sure that they know exactly what language is in use on a page that they might be returning to a user in their results. They know as well as you do that getting this wrong can lead to a very bad user experience. So of course, you'll want to translate all the pages and elements on that page into a local language, and you can even use translated words in the URLS to help.
And don't let a search engine try to guess at the character set you're using when it comes tospecial characters and letters of different languages. You can define the character set in your HTML markup, and many search engines do well with UTF-8 encoding. This is a pretty easy thing to accomplish, and can be done with a single line of code in the head section of your pages. Generally, while very good at detecting and handling multilingual content, search engines can get pretty confused if you place multiple languages on a single page.
This means it's especially important to translate every element of your code and not just the text. A best practice is to stick to one language throughout every element of the code and copy and avoid side-by-side translations. Now, there are a handful of pages that might not really target one language or a location. For example, a language selector page or a country locator page. And you can you use what's known as the X-Default hreflang Attribute. This annotation is supported by Google, Yandex, and a handful of other search engines, and it signals to search engines, "This page doesn't have a set target language or location," and it helps reduce confusion.
In general, you'll wanna indicate to search engines the equivalent versions of a page in different localizations by using the hreflang attribute or a metalanguage tag. And we'll cover all the things we can do with these tags for the search engines that support them in the next videos. Another thing to remember is that one way search engines discover content is by crawling from link to link, and this is no different for your translated multilingual content. This means that links to untranslated or unlocalized pages run the risk of confusing a search engine and potentially leading it away from the rest of your translated content.
Take the time to link to your other translated pages so that they too can be discovered, and as much as possible, try to stay within the site structure you've decided on. For example, if you've gone with a subfolder solution to address country and language combinations, but you have a single Contact Us page that would suffice for everyone, you might do well to recreate that in the localized languages and build out local differences so that you can have a Contact Us page that fits nicely into each of these subfolder combinations. And note that as you take action to help search engines index and crawl your localized content, you're also helping improve the user experience.
By providing selectors and links to other localized versions of a page, you're letting search engines and users who may not speak that language access the right page to get the information they need. One thing that comes up often is the duplicate content worry. In the earlier days of SEO, people tried to build out lots and lots of pages by using the same or slightly altered content all over their website in an attempt to get more pages for more search engines to index, and of course more chances to rank them. Search engines realized this, and they put in place changes that would penalize this practice, and as a result, this duplicate content suffered in the search results.
But search engines continue to evolve, and when we're talking about internationalized content, these days you don't have to worry about duplicated content when you're translatingmultiple versions of your site copy. Today's engines will expect that translated copy is highly similar to other variations, so if you really only do have one office around the world, the fact that your US English and Canada English contact pages end up having largely the same exact content isn't going to hurt you. How search engines access and understand your multilingual, localized content will depend on how well your site is structured and optimized for each language and country you support.
Ensuring the crawlers can access and crawl your site properly will go a long way in discovering, indexing, and sharing your content so it can return the right version of your content to the right potential visitors.
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