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This sustainable content marketing definition, how-to & marketing tips keeps your content evergreen & competitive post-seismic content marketing shift.
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If you’ve downloaded our complete guide to outreach or followed our blog series on getting started with outreach, building your outreach list and how to find suitable sites and outreach targets, you should have already collected the following information for your outreach list: Publication name Domain Author name Contact details If you’re manually building your […]
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The internet gives a business the power to compete on a global level. Gone are the days when your only competitor was the other shop across the road. If you sell your products or services on a website, you have the power to quickly expand beyond your country’s borders, without spending millions of dollars on opening new physical stores.
But in order to do this, you have to speak their native or preferred language. And, in order to speak their language, you need to translate your website. Apparently, setting up a multi language website is one of the trickiest things in the digital marketing field. International SEO is pretty hard! Beside translating it the right way, you can run into a lot of other technical issues, most of them regarding incorrect indexation and display of the language versions by Google.
Even more, Google has recently changed the way it displays websites internationally. You can no longer see the results in another country by simply visiting its Google version. Instead, you have to go through the search settings and select the specific country and language. This shows Google’s interest to make search results more relevant by location, so it’s more important than ever to get everything right!
In this small international SEO guide, we’re going to try to solve some of the more complicated issues regarding multilingual websites and hopefully shed some light on the most common hreflang mistakes and other general multilingual website issues that webmasters make when they start expanding internationally.
Technical issues in multilingual websites are more common on custom builds. It might not always be the webmaster’s fault, but as long as you have the information and leave the problems there, you have no excuse. Here are some of the most common technical problems around the web and how to properly fix them.
Oh, the hreflangs! Studies show that around 75% percent of the hreflang implementations have mistakes in them. To be honest, while I was searching for examples online, many multi lingual websites did not even have the hreflang implemented at all!
That’s a concern, because not only does that prevent you from ranking high in other countries, but it also dilutes your website’s content, making it seem less relevant in Google’s eyes.
So what is this hreflang attribute? Well, in theory, it’s pretty simple:
The hreflang attribute is a way of telling Google “Hey, I have another localized version of my website here, and it’s in this language.”
Here’s a video from SEJ where Bill Hunt is explaining exactly what HREFlang is and how to use it correctly.
Of course, if you don’t use it, Google is probably able to figure things out on its own. But multilingual sites that help Google figure things out easier are known to get a boost in rankings! Here’s a good example from SeerInteractive that shows a traffic growth after the hreflang attribute has been correctly implemented:
Graph from Seer Interactive showing a growth in traffic after correct HrefLang implementation
Here are the most common mistkes that people do when implementing the hreflang attribute:
No hreflang attribute: Of course, the first rule would be to have the hreflang annotation in your HTML. As I said, I found many examples that don’t contain the attribute at all. Here’s just one of them:
Missing hreflang on fbcareers.com
Although you can clearly see that they offer the website in multiple languages, the hreflang attribute is nowhere to be found in the HTML source code:
Come out, come out, wherever you are! Hello? Mr. Hreflang? Are you here? …
No self-referencing URL: On Google’s official page about multilanguage websites, it’s clearly stated that you must use a self-referencing rel=”alternate” hreflang attribute.
If you have multiple language versions of a URL, each language page should identify different language versions, including itself. For example, if your site provides content in French, English, and Spanish, the Spanish version must include a rel="alternate" hreflang="x" link for itself in addition to links to the French and English versions. Similarly, the English and French versions must each include the same references to the French, English, and Spanish versions. |
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| https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en | |
Here’s an example of a site that is missing the self-referencing hreflang tag.
The website elcorteingles.es is missing the self referencing Spanish hreflang attribute
In another example, you can see from the title that the text is in English and that the English hreflang attribute is missing from the page. However, the page clearly indicates the Spanish version of the website.
Missing self-referencing English hreflang attribute on cricketwireless.com
What’s even worse about this case is that the link tag containing the Spanish version is static and implemented in the head template of the entire website. This means that every page will have the same hreflang attribute, continuously misleading Google and harming the website.
Spanish version of the website with self-referencing hreflang but missing English hreflang
As you can see above, this time we have the self-referencing attribute in place, but we’re now missing the attribute that specifies the English version we saw earlier.
In this case, the correct implementation would include both versions, like this:
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” href=”https://www.cricketwireless.com/” />
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”es” href=”https://espanol.cricketwireless.com/” />
To prove that bad implementation won’t get you where you want to be, I selected US as the region in Chrome, Spanish as the language and then I searched for cricketwireless.
Google shows English version on Spanish search
As you can see, the result isn’t the desired Spanish subdomain. Although the webmaster did specify the Spanish version, they missed out on the other rules. I performed this search in the Spanish region as well, and the Google search results were the same.
So if you want your website to rank well across all regions in all languages, make sure you have your hreflang return tags set up, so that Google can figure out which web pages are linked to one another.
Not in header: If your hreflang attribute return tags aren’t found in the header, Google will basically analyze the entire page any try to figure things out on its own before realizing the answer was right under its nose. Make sure you have it between your opening and closing head tags.
A hreflang attribute specifying the French version of a website should look like this:
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”fr” href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/fr/” />
It’s similar to the link tags that insert JavaScript or CSS files. You can also use a sitemap or a HTTP header for non-HTML files. However, the link tag in the <head> section of your website is the recommended version.
Here’s a really weird implementation, where the tags are outside the head section and inside a <li> tag instead of a <link> one. Strange and interesting, but definitely not the right way to do it.
Strange language implementation on semver.org
Don’t do that! Use the link tag as mentioned above!
Relative URLs: Google can misinterpret relative URLs, so make sure you make them absolute (https://yoursite.com/specific-page instead of just /specific-page/). If the page is a 404 or a relative URL, there might be issues in the overall indexing of your language version.
I couldn’t find another example, but you can take a look at the example above from semver.org, where the URLs in the already badly implemented hreflang are relative (/lang/ar) instead of absolute.
The correct implementation in this case would be <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”ar” href=”https://semver.org/lang/ar/” />.
It doesn’t point to a specific page: Each page should point to the specific counterpart in another language, not the entire foreign language version. I couldn’t find another example, but we can use a previous one. Because there is a single hreflang attribute on the whole website, different pages actually point to the root of that language version, regardless of the page or language version you’re on.
Specific page hreflang attribute points to root of language version
If you implement a non-dynamic link tag in the header template of your website, all pages will have the same HREFlang. This is a bad idea!
In some cases, such as this one, you’re better off not having the hreflang attribute at all rather than having it implemented incorrectly.
The correct implementation in this case would be https://www.cricketwireless.com/support/apps-and-services.html with a rel=”alternate” attribute to https://espanol.cricketwireless.com/ayuda/27g/aplicaciones-y-servicios.html.
Also, remember that it should have a self-referencing hreflang attribute to itself.
Incorrect language / country codes: The language code is very often misspelled. Many times, webmasters and web developers use the country code instead of the language code. Here are some official Google insights:
Official Google statement about country codes in the hreflang attribute
So, normally, you have to put the language code, not the country code. The country code is optional and can be added to target specific languages in specific regions. For example, you could target the Spanish speaking audience in the US, or the English speaking audience in France. Is this useful?
I don’t know… let’s say that some people from UK are visiting Italy, and they want to buy some souvenirs. They don’t know any Italian, so they type “buy souvenirs in Venice” in Google. There you go: you just have an English speaking target audience in an Italian region.
The full list of language codes can be found here, and the full optional list of country codes can be found here.
No x-default attribute for language pick page: Google recommends using one more tag, placed after all the other languages, to specify the language selection page, if there is one. For example, if the homepage just presents a list of languages to choose from, that would be the x-default language version.
In the following case, you can see that the homepage of nunnauuni.com is a language selection page. The page is well set up, redirecting users on their second visit accordingly. Although the site has all the other language attributes, including the self-referencing one, it’s missing the x-default tag which specifies the general language selection page.
Missing x-default tag on nunnauuni.com
The homepage is also missing all the other tags. Instead, it should include them and also have a self-referencing x-default tag. The correct code to be added after the language list in this case is <link rel=”alternate” href=”https://nunnauuni.com/” hreflang=”x-default” />.
If you’re using 301’s to geo-redirect users by IP, you can specify the default version in the HTTP header. To do this in WordPress, you will need to use an HTTP Headers Plugin. The code, however, is a little bit different: Link: http://www.example.es; rel=”alternate”; hreflang=”es-ES”.
Untranslated pages hreflang to Homepage: This is a big issue, especially if your Homepage is an important page for your website. This happens a lot mostly because of how the hreflang metatags were implemented, generally as result of a plugin.
Most plugin seem to have this issue. If a page or blog post isn’t translated, the plugin doesn’t really know what to add to the hreflang link attribute so it just adds the homepage or a “/” which can be interpreted as a relative URL for the homepage.
Polylang, the translation plugin of my choice when it comes to multi language websites on WordPress doesn’t seem to have this issue. You can set it up to not display the wrong hreflang attribute when the page is untranslated. You should also remove any internal links that change language from the menu if there aren’t any translated versions available.
People still don’t understand what the canonical tag does. They have a vague idea about it, but many times use it the wrong way. In a nutshell, here’s what the canonical tag actually does:
The rel=”canonical” tag tells search engines what page to display in their results pages.
To better understand the tag, think of it like this: if you have 10 web pages about the same subject, they will start competing with each other in the search engines. This confuses Google, so you can use the canonical tag to help it figure things out, and point to the exact page you prefer being shown in the search engines.
The canonical tag should always be a self-referencing one, meaning page A should point to itself, except when you want it to display something else instead of page A in the SERPS. Having a self-referencing canonical tag will help you remove any risk of duplicate content issues generated by dynamic parameters, such as ?replytocomm or eCommerce filters.
The canonical tag works! I’ll share a story. Some time ago, I published a post on my personal blog, which was syndicated by another publisher. I didn’t manage to get it indexed on my blog and, because the other publisher was more popular, Google indexed their article first. So, in a couple of weeks, they happily ranked in the top 5 with my article. I contacted them, politely asked for them to add the canonical tag and in about a week, Google picked it up and started displaying my page instead.
Don’t try to trick Google into displaying just a landing page or some strange page that doesn’t actually serve the user’s intent. It won’t work and you can risk getting penalized.
Getting back to the multililanguage websites, the canonical tag should be self-referencing the page it’s on, unless otherwise specifically desired . A common error is this:
The wrong way to do it is: www.yourwebsite.fr/defile-mode/ with a canonical URL to it’s English counterpart, www.youtwebsite.com/fashion-show/.
If you combine this with an HREFlang attribute, then you’re basically fooling Google around, telling it to go from EN to FR and then back from FR to EN again.
A good implementation would be: www.yourwebsite.fr/defile-mode/ with a canonical tag pointing to either www.yourwebsite.fr/defile-mode/ (itself) or, if desired, www.yourwebsite.fr/some-other-french-page/.
Never use the rel=”alternate” hreflang to solve duplicate content issues, as this is not its purpose. It will only tell Google to show that version of the page for a different location and language in a browser.
I was discussing this recently with someone at a meeting. One of his clients insisted that the English homepage on his site was displaying in French by default, instead of English. The reason? His browser was in French, so the main English page was automatically redirected by a WordPress plugin.
Now Matt Cutts said in his cloaking video that geo-redirect isn’t something to worry about. He also says that users coming from France or a French speaking location will be happy to get their content displayed directly in French.
However, keep in mind that although you can send users from France to the French version, you can’t guarantee that everyone in France uses a French IP or has their browser in French.
Many people use their browsers in English, for example. This means that they will constantly be redirected, no matter what they do. Also, with VPNs becoming more and more popular, IP isn’t a fool-proof metric either.
Setting geo-redirection on its own doesn’t help you rank better in other languages. In my opinion, the best way to direct the user to the right version is using the HREFlang attribute to properly display the desired page in their search engine. Of course, if they use a different IP with VPNs, the search engine will still display the wrong version, thinking the user lives somewhere else, but any user using a VPN should be aware of that.
English and French
If someone is going to access your business website directly, it will either access it through the right country URL, or through the homepage. If you have a clearly visible language selector in place, I consider any user to be smart enough these days to be able to get to the right version.
In case your website already provides automatic redirection and you choose to keep it, make sure you set the x-default hreflang attribute as well. This will tell Google where the language selection page is and it will display that whenever it is unsure of the user’s true location or preferred language.
Make sure that the language selection flags are clearly visible, on desktop and on mobile.
Another common issue when translating pages is to forget the no-index tag on, or leave it there on purpose. I can understand forgetting it, as you do not want Google to index your alternate language version of the website before it’s finished.
But if you leave it on purpose, it doesn’t really make any sense. I’ve read some rumors about people being afraid of duplicate content penalties. Although there is no such a thing as a duplicate content penalty, I understand the issue.
You might be thinking “How could someone think French and English versions are duplicates?” At first, I thought so myself, but then I realized it must be about the same language displayed in different locations. For example, en-us and en-gb.
Although you could simply use the language selector to display the same version in both regions, it can be useful to have separate versions.
This way, you can have different sliders, products or offers in different regions. For example, if you sell T-shirts with messages, some texts might fit the US and only some might fit the UK.
If you do have multiple English versions, using the no-index tag is a bad idea if you have all the HREFlang annotations set up properly. If you reference a version with HREFlang and then use no-index on it, you’re basically telling Google “Hey check this out over here!” and then “Ha ha, just joking, nothing to crawl here, go away!”
Don’t joke with Google!
One common mistake that happens is having a static implementation of the language switcher button or flag. Users expect to see what they searched for. If you’re in a subpage of the website, changing the language shouldn’t take the user to the homepage of that language. At least, not all the time. It should take them, preferably, to that specific page, in the desired language.
The problem here is that it’s not always that easy to do. You can have, for example, 10 pages in English, but only 8 are translated in French. What do you do with the other two? Well, you have three options:
Option three is the worst from my point of view, because users will most likely leave the website on the spot when they receive the message. It basically says “This website doesn’t have what you’re looking for.”
The homepage option isn’t such a big deal on a small website, where you only have About Us, Services and Contact Us. People will figure out easily on what page they were previously. It can still affect the user experience a little, but things will be fine.
However, if you have a blog or a huge website with thousands of pages and articles, the users will have a very hard time finding what article they were on if you send them to the homepage.
A good example of a language selection implementation that always sends you to the homepage can be viewed on clinlife.com.
Since we’ve just spotted the untranslated URL structure in the example above, let’s talk about this. Why not translate all your foreign URLs? I mean, we all know that using some keywords in the URL can help you rank better. Obviously, ‘studies’ will be less helpful in Brasil than ‘estudos’. We know the content isn’t dynamic on a static URL structure because the URL parent changes (/brpt#/ to /caen#/).
If you’re going to translate your website, make sure you translate your URLs as well.
This is often overlooked in eCommerce website builders and even search engine optimization tools and there are many examples that can be given. Here’s one from an eCommerce website:
No url translation on antrhropologie.com
And here’s another online store making the same mistake:
No URL translation on thenorthface.com
Google here and Google there, but the truth is that in other countries, Google isn’t the most popular search engine! Russia, for example, uses Yandex, and China has Baidu. Different countries also use different search engines in different proportions.
Source: www.martinkovac.com
Google is censored in some countries, so think twice before spending time to translate the content for those regions. Also, consider that other search engines don’t have the same exact algorithms as Google does. It’s good to know, for example, that Yandex doesn’t use links in it’s algorithm.
This is one of the things that always keeps international competitors far behind the local ones. Google really appreciates local/regional links, so if you have a website translation in Spanish, you’re better off having links from .es toplevel domains than having links from .com toplevel domains.
Local competitors know this and, even more, it’s far easier for them to acquire .es links than it is for an international competitor. They don’t only have to rely on link building, because they can network and attend meetings, meet new people and promote their websites in other ways.
It’s also very common for an international website not to focus on it’s translated versions. But since you’ve spent so much time translating it, shouldn’t you also focus on promoting it?
If we take one of our previous examples and feed it to the Site Explorer, we can see the discrepancy:
Screenshot from the cognitiveSEO’s Site Explorer, showing the discrepancy between links
What’s even worse about that 0.7% is that all those .fr links are pointing to the English language version of the website:
Regional backlinks points to wrong version
Call it local SEO if you want, but focus on building some regional backlinks and make sure you build them to the right version.
Although user experience issues can still be attributed to lack of knowledge, content issues probably have more to do with unawareness. Anyway, here’s what you should be keeping an eye on:
Let’s start with something really common… We all know that Google Translate doesn’t always get it right. It actually… gets it wrong lots of the time (for now).
Most people use this technique to get English content into other languages (usually with Google Translator or an Android / iOS App) , because search engines aren’t too good at detecting automatically translated content. Sure, Google might not be as good at understanding languages other than English, but users still are. And since UX is such an important metric, it’s a waste of money and time trying to do this at scale.
Human translations are definitely better, as long as they actually know both languages well (and one of them is preferably a native language). Although manually translated content is more expensive, providing bad language translation to users will affect your brand and probably the chance to ever hit that target market in the future. If you want to build something solid, get a professional human translator.
Don’t just translate the keywords and expect to get results from it. A professional translator can’t do everything. It’s a good start, but you might also need to contact someone that knows both the native language and search engine optimization to be able to properly identify and add the right phrases in your content.
It would also be irrelevant to compare numbers, as English is far more used than Italian for example, so the English numbers will always be higher. However, I hope you get the idea that people search different things in different countries, but want the same product. Do the research!
If you really want to have an impact, you have to study the culture a little bit. A translator might help, but you might need more than this. You’ll need a regional, someone who’s actually lived there and can provide some insights. Of course, this is at a higher level, but it’s worth doing it if you have the resources.
A good easy example to start with are the date formats. Some countries use dd/mm/yy, while others use mm/dd/yy. Another good example would be showing an article about pork meat in a Muslim region. Not a very bright idea. Not only will it be completely irrelevant, but it will also make a lot of people feel bad.
This is something common. Many people these days use the Google Recaptcha, but very few actually translate it. The result is something like this:
All the content in French, but the captcha is in English
Now for you this isn’t a problem, since you’re reading this article. But for someone else who doesn’t speak English, it could be. If they don’t know what to do, they won’t be able to contact you.
The webmasters did take action against this by displaying the following message: Cochez la case “I’m not a robot” et suivez les instructions. Ce service nous protège des spammeurs.
Problem solved, right? Not quite! Does this look familiar?
Second occasional verification. This can also be different each time.
Yeah… this can be a little frustrating.
No captcha translation makes users unhappy
But the fix for it is actually very easy. Recaptcha works using a JavaScript file. That JS file can be translated with a ULR parameter. If the plugin you’re using doesn’t allow this, you can search the code for the following script:
https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api.js
Then, just add ?hl=xx after the URL, where xx is the language code, same as with the HREFlang annotations (fr,es,en). To translate it in French, for example, it should look like this:
https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api.js?hl=fr
I’m not talking about people that are trying to target English websites to English speakers from Spain, but people that are trying to target English websites everywhere, regardless of their language or location. This could either be done with intention or by mistake.
Let’s start with the mistake. Say I know for a fact that people in Spain search for my product in English. I want to target that market so I add HREFlang like this:
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”es” href=”https://yourwebsite.com” />
As mentioned before in the beginning of the article, this is wrong! Why? Because that’s actually a language code, so now I’m targeting the Spanish speaking users from everywhere to display them an English page.
The correct way to do it would be to use both the language and the region codes. For example, if you want to target the English speaking residents from Spain, you would use en-ES:
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-ES” href=”https://yourwebsite.com” />
But now, obviously, someone might want to abuse this… so a shady thing to do would be to separately target English residents from everywhere, like this:
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-ES” href=”https://yourwebsite.com” />
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-DE” href=”https://yourwebsite.com” />
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-BE” href=”https://yourwebsite.com” />
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-IT” href=”https://yourwebsite.com” />
etc.
Notice that I’ve used the same URL each time in the example above. If I had a different version for each region (which isn’t a complete duplicate) then it would make sense:
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-ES” href=”https://yourwebsite.com/spain” />
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-DE” href=”https://yourwebsite.com/germany” />
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-BE” href=”https://yourwebsite.com/belgium” />
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-IT” href=”https://yourwebsite.com/italy” />
etc.
This is only acceptable if there really are different offers for different regions.
If all the versions are identical, it’s basically a waste of time and HDD space. It might be alright to target a couple of markets or more, but not all of them. If I want to target all English speakers from all regions, I can simply just specify the language and leave the rest to Google:
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” href=”https://yourwebsite.com” /> (This targets all English speaking users, regardless of their region or location)
People will always try to find a way to spam. They will only change titles, for example, leaving the rest of the content in English and they use HREFlang to target all regions. I’ve seen multilanguage sites trying to target all languages, without regions, on the same page, like this:
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”es” href=”https://yourwebsite.com” />
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”it” href=”https://yourwebsite.com” />
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”de” href=”https://yourwebsite.com” />
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”fr” href=”https://yourwebsite.com” />
etc.
Unfortunately, I was unable to find a specific example, but I’m sure there are some out there.
But Google isn’t stupid. Don’t try to rank a single page everywhere using the HREFlang attribute. Not only will this not work, but it would be against Google’s guidelines and might actually hurt your rankings.
The HREFlang attribute should only be used if you truly have something unique/specific to display to that audience, in that language and in that region.
Fonts can always be a problem when translating a website. You have to make sure that your current font supports all the special characters in the language you’re translating the site to. Otherwise they can mess up the web design by displaying a default font only for the missing characters and will usually look horrible! Something like this:
“When the utilized font doesn’t contain a specific character, the software will use another font for it.”
A good thing to look for is what happens on your mobile device. Sometimes, the characters display properly on your desktop but fail to display correctly on mobile devices. Also, your computer might display the font properly if it has it installed, but other computers might not. Using your mobile device to test this is a good idea.
Usually it’s a font implementation issue, so make sure you check with your web designer before deciding to replace the font completely.
Last but not least, don’t forget or ignore social media. If you went through all the effort of translating the soon to be multilanguage websites, you might as well put in some effort into promoting it. If you’ve already registered different social media accounts for other countries, put them to good use by posting relevant content there as well.
Keep in mind that in some countries, different social media platforms are popular. For example, don’t spend time trying to promote your website on Twitter in East European countries for instance. (I can tell you for a fact that people don’t really use the platform). On the other side, in other countries, Facebook doesn’t even exist (China).
Things also vary depending on the niche you’re in. Tech images and news don’t work well on Pinterest, but cooking recipes and healthy lifestyle/motivational messages do. Thing is, your target audience might be in different places.
Having an active social media account is a sign of authority. It means the brand is real and, most importantly, alive. It will help you gain the traction you need in order to rank well in Google with the translated version.
A multilingual website with properly performed international SEO is definitely something not easy to set up but, hopefully, this article helped you understand how to avoid the most common HREFlang mistakes if you’re planning to translate your website.
Make sure you don’t set up the hreflang meta tags wrong or you will create more issues than not adding them at all. If you’re on a custom platform or you’re using a custom website builder and want to make sure your implementation is correct, you can try Aleyda Solis’ Tool. Use it to generate the correct HREFlang tags and then add them or compare them to your current ones. Remember, they need to be in your <head> section.
Keep in mind that your business website is alwaays better off if it’s manually translated by a professional. When the user changes the language from the language switcher, send them to the right page or make it clear that there is no translation available. Don’t trust translation plugins out of the box and make sure you check how they implement everything.
Also, since you’re here, make sure you check out our article about using subdomains vs using subfolders when building multiple website sections. They might come in handy but, long story short, better have domain.com/en than en.domain.com.
Thanks so much for reading this till the end! If you have any comments, ideas or opinions, feel free to share them with us in the comments section.
The post Vital Hreflang & Multi Language Website Mistakes That Most Webmasters Make appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
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Titles are among the most important things in SEO. But, although it is very basic to have your keywords inside the title, it isn’t always easy to write SEO friendly title tags. That’s why we’ve prepared this guide and set of best practices you need to follow in order to have well optimized titles on all of your website’s pages.
If there’s one thing I’ve noticed during many years of practicing SEO, it’s that people heavily neglect titles. Countless times have I been told – “I’ve worked with an SEO agency before, but with no results” – just to see that the “agency” hasn’t even optimized something as basic as the title tag.
You might think that the title tag is the phrase you write in WordPress or whatever platform you use and which represents the title of your page/article. However…
The title tag is actually an HTML element which serves a number of key roles in browsers, search engines and on the web, in general.
Like any other HTML tag, the title meta tag is surrounded by angle brackets and it has a start tag <title> and an end tag </title>. The actual title is found between those tags.
The title of this particular article you’re reading right now is written as follows:
<title>How to Write SEO Friendly Title Tags | Guide & Best Practices</title>
If you hit CTRL + U on your Windows machine (I don’t know the combination for Mac OS Safari) or right click anywhere on the article and hit View Source, you will be able to spot the title tag in its true form.
If you can’t see it, use CTRL + F to search for the start tag <title>.
The title tag’s contents are also displayed inside the browser tabs. You can hover over them to view the full title of a web page.
However, titles aren’t there just to look pretty. They serve a purpose, especially for search engines and SEO.
The title tags are considered to be an important SEO ranking factor. There are multiple reasons why titles are important for SEO. The first one would be that it’s the main thing users see when they search something on Google or any other search engine.
Unless specified otherwise, the title meta tag will also be used on most social media platforms when sharing a link.
You might notice a slight difference between the Google title and the Facebook title. Truth is that the original title is actually the one in the Facebook post.
Our homepage’s title tag is actually “SEO Tools to Increase Your Traffic – cognitiveSEO” but on Google it’s “cognitiveSEO: SEO Tools to Increase Your Traffic”.
Why is it different in the Google search results? Well, it’s because sometimes, Google tends to rewrite titles. It’s not something we did on purpose. Google chose to do it.
The ‘brand first’ rewrite is one of the most common title rewrites. It usually happens only with the homepage. As you can see, the pricing page has the branding at the end of the title.
We’ll talk more about title rewrites towards the end of the article, so keep reading.
Although they seem very similar and do share some similarities, there is a pretty big difference between the title tag and the H1 tag.
They are completely different HTML tags (<title></title> vs <h1></h1>) and serve different purposes.
The big main difference between the Title Tag and the H1 Tag is that the Title Tag does not show on the web page itself.
The Title Tag’s main purpose is to show on search engines and external websites that make a reference to your web page’s title.
On the other side, the H1 shows on the webpage or within the website itself.
This isn’t always the case and it depends on the CMS you’re using. However, most Content Management Systems out there tend to use the H1 tag as the on-page title.
Most of the time, the Title Tag and the H1 Tag are identical. For example, in WordPress, when you create a new blog post and write the title, you’re actually writing the H1 Tag. WordPress then pulls that information and also adds it to the Title Tag.
However, if you use an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO, you can specify a custom SEO Title Tag which will be different from the H1.
This means you can show something on your website but something different in the search engines. This is useful as you can add multiple keywords into your H1 tag when the Title Tag is too long and doesn’t fit.
Here’s one example of a longer H1 tag:
And the shorter Title Tag accompanying it, that fits the SERPs:
Another big difference is that there can be multiple H1s on a web page, although we recommend using H2 and H3 tags for multiple subtitles and sticking with a single H1 tag.
For example, on the blog page, WordPress automatically converts all the blog posts H1s to H2s, as the H1 of the blog page is “The SEO Blog from cognitiveSEO”.
On the other side, it’s crucial that your website have only one title tag per page. Multiple title tags can negatively impact your rankings, so make sure you don’t do that.
Before we talk about actually crafting your SEO titles, we have to make sure you’re following the best practices.
Here’s a list of things that you should try to constantly keep in mind when you’re writing your titles. Once you know these, writing an SEO friendly title meta tag should be pretty easy!
I’m writing this first because it’s very important. Sure, the titles are read by robots and algorithms and they’re the ones that rank your site.
However, when they finally make it to the top, titles are read by humans, who eventually dictate if they will click on it or not! If they don’t click on it, the algorithms will know your title isn’t a great one.
Try to avoid keyword stuffing and instead focus on being relevant.
User intent is also an important factor. What are your customers looking for? Are you writing your title for a commercial keyword or for an informational one?
Try to think what your target audience and customers would click on. You can always take a look at what your competition is doing. Don’t copy, but get inspired. The top positions are clearly doing at least something right.
When writing your title tag for SEO purposes, one of the first things you have to keep in mind is that the title has to be short.
Why?
If your title tags are too long, Google will make them shorter and will add […] at the end. This process is called truncation and it looks just like this:
This won’t directly impact your SEO but it can affect your CTR, which will eventually impact positions. Generally, you want to keep your title short enough to fit the Google search results.
How long can your title be? Generally, it’s a good idea to keep the title tag lengths between 60 to 70 characters. However, Google actually has a limit of 600 pixels in which it displays the title and, because different characters have different widths, the limit number might be different.
That’s why it’s a better idea to use tools such as the Yoast SEO plugin to make sure your title fits properly.
If you don’t use WordPress or another CMS and cannot install an SEO plugin on your web host, you can always use a tool such as MetaTags.io to quickly check if your title, URL and meta description are displaying properly in the search engine result pages.
You can then manually add your titles and meta tags for SEO on your website, regardless of your platform or web host.
Keep in mind that it’s also a bad idea to keep your title too short. Too short titles might not grab the user’s attention either.
Quick tip: You can use | instead of – as a separator in your title sections. | has less pixels than – and in some situations it can help you get a fully displayed title, without having to remove any words.
Google puts more weight on the keywords that are closer to the beginning. This also boosts the click through rate, as users click more on the results which contain the keywords they have just searched for.
Sometimes, you won’t be able to add the focus keyword with the most search volume right at the beginning.
For example, the primary keyword with the most search volume for this article is “title tags SEO”. However, that’s pretty hard to get inside a title and still make it sound good and natural.
Google is smart enough to figure out what an article is about, but you have to give it some good hints. If you give the right hints, it will figure it out easier and will reward you for it with better rankings.
So, writing “SEO Title Tags” instead of “Title Tags SEO” won’t be a big problem.
Quick Tip: If you also do Google Adwords, it’s a good idea to follow the best practices offered there. Google spends a lot of time perfecting CTR, so they definitely know what users want to click.
Try to keep them in order. For example, this article is optimized for the following keywords:
“how to write seo friendly title tags”
“seo friendly title tags”
“seo title tags guide”
“seo title tags best practices”
If you look at the title of this article, you’ll see that you can find all these phrases in order, from left to right, although there might be some other words in-between.
The keywords must also align with what you have to say in the article. You shouldn’t include keywords just because they have a high search volume.
Optimizing one article for too many keywords is a bad idea. You might try to kill two birds with a stone. For example, if you write an article entitled “SEO Guide”, don’t expect it to rank for “keyword research”, “onpage optimization”, “link building”, etc.
Take advantage of the H1 Tag as well. If you can’t fit all the keywords you find relevant into the title, you can squeeze a couple more in the H1. Make sure you keep the focus keyword in the H1 as well.
Also, don’t forget the meta descriptions. You should add your keywords there as well, as Google tends to ignore your meta description if it doesn’t contain the keywords the user is searching for.
You should take care of this before you even start writing your article. Check if your site doesn’t already have a page optimized for very similar keywords.
In other words, you need to have unique titles for your articles, each targeting a specific topic and set of keywords.
However, writing separate articles for each and every keyword is also a bad idea! You’ll end up with an issue called keyword cannibalization, when too many articles are competing for the same keywords.
For example, if I had two separate articles for “how to write seo title tags” and “seo title tags best practices” they would both compete for the keyword “seo title tags”.
Sure, you could still optimize them separately and they might even rank the way you want. However, if you start having more and more articles that target the same keywords, it might become harder and harder to rank with them.
So, since both of these keywords cover similar topics (regarding writing title tags for SEO) I’ve decided to try and optimize the article for both keywords.
However, for a completely different topic such as “Do Title Tags Affect SEO?” I would definitely write a completely separate article.
Cannibalization can also happen often when you publish a lot of content. When you’re writing 3 pieces a month for 2 years straight, you sometimes simply forget you’ve written about a topic before. I’ve done this mistake before.
That’s why we’re trying to cover as much of a topic as possible in a single article. Chances are that we won’t be writing something specifically for writing title tags again. We will only improve this article when the time comes.
However, that doesn’t mean you can’t add something about titles in another article. For example, you can have an H2 section about titles and how to write them in an SEO Optimization Guide. You can then use this content to improve your internal linking strategy.
The first thing potential readers see about your article when they search for a keyword on Google is your title tag. If that title tag doesn’t convince them to click, Google will observe that and consider it as a negative signal.
On the other hand, if more users click on your title, Google will see that as a positive signal and reward your website with better positions.
So, if your article is currently ranking #3 and out of 1,000 impressions, 18% of the clicks go to your article, 12% to the #2 spot and 25% to the #1 spot, you have a high change of switching seats with the #2 spot, to your benefit.
That’s why you have to make your title catchy. You can do this by adding emotion to your title or words that increase CTR such as “free”, “example” or even numbers (7, 21, 77 etc).
Here are a couple of examples:
5 Keyword Research Tips That Will Blow Your Mind
Best Free SEO Tools to Help You Improve Your Rankings in 2019
However, keywords have a higher priority, at least until you get your article to the top. Until you get to page 1, almost nobody except the search engines will see your article anyway.
Don’t bother testing the CTR by changing the title until you’re at least on page #1 of Google. Also, keep in mind that any modifications can impact your rankings negatively as well.
For example, if a no. 1 position increase on the main keyword resulted in 100 more visitors per month but the trade off in modifying your title would be to remove a set of keywords that could bring 200 visitors per month, then it’s not a good trade-off.
If your article is already ranking #1, you should’t make any changes until your competitors rank better than you.
Quick tip: You can use ▷ in front of your title to make it stand out from the crowd. You can also try adding emojis to your titles. where it makes sense. However, don’t turn your title into a clown (no offense intended to any clown SEO readers). Keep it civil.
If your main keyword is very short and you don’t have any secondary keywords that are relevant or make sense to add into your title, add a call to action or try to make it catchy.
For example, if your title is simply “Ski Rental Prices” and there are no other keywords that have search volume or make sense targeting, then you can add “50% Discount for 1st Time Clients” or “Best Prices in the Entire Resort”.
This way, you are taking advantage of the real estate instead of wasting it.
Convince your potential readers that the article is relevant by adding the current year inside your article’s title. If you have a topic that keeps changing or evolving, it’s always a good idea to keep updating your articles.
However, once you update it, make sure you let your users know about this. Here are some examples from our blog:
Are Web Directories Still Relevant for SEO in 2019?
(This article was written a long time ago and updated this year).
21 Effective Low Effort & High Return SEO Techniques for 2019
(This article was written as new this year).
You can also add these keywords in the meta description if they don’t fit inside the title, although it’s better if they are in the title as well.
When you update articles, make sure you don’t also modify the URL. The URL should never be changed, if possible.
The title is a very important ranking factor. However, there is a ranking factor more important than the title: the content itself!
That’s why it’s always a good idea to back up your title with relevant content. You can do this by adding relevant keywords in your content.
You can find these keywords easily by using the cognitiveSEO Keyword Tool & Content Assistant.
Also, make sure you avoid what SEOs call keyword stuffing. This occurs when a particular keyword or set of keywords is found too often inside an article.
If you use social media to promote your content (and you should) you can always use different titles for different platforms.
By default, social media platforms take their titles from the title meta tag. However, you can use protocols such as Open Graph or Twitter Cards to set custom titles for your social media posts.
This can help boost your traffic and engagement, as you can stick with using keywords on your SEO title, while using something catchy and rich on emotion on your social media posts.
If you use WordPress, you can quickly do this via the Yoast SEO plugin. You can even specify a different description excerpt and image. This comes in handy in case the thumbnail image sizes on your website don’t match the ones on Facebook.
On a custom platform you can manually add the meta tags into the HTML:
OG example for title: <meta property=”og:title” content=” “/>. The title goes between the apostrophes under the content attribute. This title will show on Facebook instead of the title tag itself.
Once you have the best practices in mind, you can start actually creating your title. However, step one doesn’t involve any writing!
Everything in SEO starts with keyword research. Without it, you’re venturing into the dark. You don’t know if the keywords have any search volume, you don’t know your competition and you don’t even know if your content is relevant.
Make sure you pick a primary keyword to target for your article. You can then pick a set of secondary & long tail keywords if they fit.
For example, in an article in Romanian which I worked on for a client, we decided to write about the primary keyword “weight loss exercises”.
However, you can always have secondary keywords, especially if you’ve decided to target more long tail phrases, with less traffic and competition.
The final title ended up begin “Best & Most Efficient Weight Loss Exercises You Can Do At Home”.
This title targets multiple keywords: “weight loss exercises”, “best weight loss exercises”, “efficient weight loss exercises”, “weight loss exercises at home”, “best weight loss exercises at home”, “efficient weight loss exercises at home”.
While this article is primarily optimized for “weight loss exercises”, it will gain traction a lot slower for this keyword as it is more competitive. Meanwhile, the other long tail phrases will bring traffic as the competition is lower and they will rank high easier.
If you’re on WordPress, there is a dedicated field for the Title. By default, what you fill there will act as both the Title and the H1 tags.
You can use the Yoast SEO plugin as mentioned above to differentiate these two.
If you have a custom made website, ask your developer where the <title> meta tag is generated from and insert your title there.
Often times, new webmasters ask themselves if they should write the title before or after they write the article.
Well… Yes. You should write the title before the article, as well as improve it later on after the article has been written.
Writing the title first will help you outline the general idea of the article. However, the title ultimately represents the article, so until the article has been written the final title remains uncertain.
As you write your article/webpage, you might notice that there are new ideas that pop up in your head and new subtopics that you want to cover. Some of them might even be relevant enough to be included in the title as well.
That’s why you often have to rewrite your title tag to better fit your content. If the title tag is not relevant, it won’t be as effective.
Optimizing title tags isn’t always an easy task. If you want to include multiple keywords while still keeping the focus on the main one, things can get tricky.
Count in the best practice of making it catchy and you really don’t have enough space to write everything you want!
That’s why it’s a good idea to keep the SEO Title for SEO and take advantage of Open Graph and Twitter Cards to optimize your titles for social media as well.
However, one rule to keep in mind here is to try and keep things simple. Overly complicated titles might do more harm than good.
After you publish the article, you have to keep an eye on how the title is performing. We all know that SEO takes time. At first, it won’t be ranking very high.
Monitor your article with Google Analytics and the Google Search Console to see how it performs. Once it gets to page #1 or the search results, take a look at the click through rate.
If the article starts stagnating on the 5th or 4th spot, you can try to play with the titles & meta descriptions to improve your CTR. This will result in higher rankings if you do things well.
Keep in mind that this can also negatively impact your rankings. For example, in an attempt to gain more clicks, you remove a long tail keyword from your title which will most probably result in a drop in rankings for that query.
However, it might be a good trade-off if your CTR for the primary keyword increases and brings in more visitors than the other long tail keyword would have brought.
So now you know how to write an SEO friendly title tag for each and every page or article on your website.
But Adrian, what if I have thousands and thousands of pages and can’t afford to write titles for each and every one of them?
That’s a good question! Often times, you can’t afford to write a title for each and every post on your website. It simply takes too much time and it isn’t practical.
In this case, you have to dynamically set up your titles. This is usually done using the CMS. If you’re on WordPress, the Yoast SEO plugin can definitely help you. Just go to the Search Appearance Settings and you can set up templates for content types:
You can also have a template for your meta description and even set up custom variables to make the titles exactly the way you want. Maybe you want to add size or weight into your titles automatically because that’s what your users seek on your products.
Other platforms might have similar plugins. Just search the web for them. Magento, for example, already does this out of the box, as it is a platform specifically designed for eCommerce and hosting a ton of products and categories.
If you’re on a custom platform, then the variables must probably be set up into the database and called in the title tag dynamically using PHP. If you don’t know how to do that, then you should get in touch with your developer.
Here are some examples of good title structures for eCommerce sites or websites where manually writing each title isn’t an option:
This way you can generate some templates that will automatically write titles for your products and category pages.
However, for those important pages you should spend some extra time doing the proper keyword research, analyzing the competition and crafting unique titles and descriptions.
If you really want to see results, the best shot is to seek out those pages with good results and traffic and to properly optimize them. This includes writing unique titles for them.
You can find those pages in your Search Console or in Google Analytics. You can also determine those pages from keyword research.
The one true answer here is because it can. However, there are multiple reasons why Google might choose a different title for your site.
The first one is obviously that your titles are simply bad. If the title of your Homepage is Homepage, then you’d probably be grateful rather than concerned anyway.
Google wants to show the most relevant title possible for the user. Here’s a quick example of how Google does that.
If I search for “do meta descriptions affect seo” this is the title we get from the SERPs:
If we also add the brand to the query, “do meta descriptions affect seo cognitiveseo”, Google modifies the title tag.
This is Google trying to prove to the user that the results it is showing are the most relevant ones. They include the brand the user was searching for.
Another example was mentioned before, where the brand name inside a title was moved from the end of the title to the front for a branded search.
In these cases the keyword was in the title already. However, Google might get the required keywords from the content itself, be it from general paragraphs or headings.
This “rewriting” also happens with the meta descriptions. In fact, the very article I’ve mentioned above has a different meta description.
The original meta description is “This description might influence whether you visit our site or not. So, do meta description tags affect SEO? If you haven’t figured it out yet, click here.”
However, Google chose to show the direct answer to the question. Unfortunately, this isn’t in our best interest, as answering that question directly might result in users not clicking through to reach our website!
It is however in Google’s best interest, as the more time users spend on Google, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes.
Secondly, your titles might be taken from anchor texts of both internal and external links pointing to your pages.
This usually happens when your pages are blocked from being crawled and indexed.
Not being able to reach your page and read its title, if Google finds a URL pointing to your page on another website, it can still index it. If that URL is under an anchor text, that anchor text can be considered as a title for the page.
This case is extreme and if you’re blocking pages from being indexed, you have greater concerns than title rewrites.
Last but not least, it is possible that the Google Cache is simply outdated. If you have recently changed your title, it might take some time until Google recrawls your page and sees the modification.
You can try to rush this action from the Google Search Console by searching for the URL and hitting the Request Indexing button:
Can you stop Google from rewriting your titles?
Well… yes. By rewriting them the way it wants. However, as long as you follow the best practices and include the right keywords in your titles, you shouldn’t worry about it. It’s not such a big deal if Google partially rewrites your titles in some cases, especially if you’re ranking high!
Title tags are one of the most important SEO ranking factors out there. In order to have great SEO results you must make sure your titles are properly optimized. They have to target the right keywords and also intrigue the reader enough to click your result.
Writing them isn’t difficult if you follow a set of best practices, and the results they bring can be significant!
How do you write your SEO titles? Do you use any tools? How do you deal with bulk titles and descriptions? Let us know in the comments section below!
The post How to Write SEO Friendly Title Tags | Guide & Best Practices appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
