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Mastering Multilingual SEO: Sitemap Strategies
Written by
Merve Alsan
Updated on
September 9, 2024
Accurate and optimized multilingual sitemaps can be one of your tickets to the big time! Brands looking to reach diverse global audiences need them to help search engines understand and index their site’s different language versions. Get this part right, and your global users will be able to find and view your site in their preferred language.
By using multilingual sitemaps correctly, you can significantly boost your brand’s international online visibility, increase targeted traffic, and deliver a more personalized user experience. Let’s take a look at how multilingual sitemaps work, and explore the best strategies of implementing them on your WordPress website.
How Does a Multilingual Sitemap Work?
From WordPress version 5.5 and onwards, the CMS automatically generates basic XML sitemaps for your website to help search engines index your content. However, if you have a multilingual site, these default sitemaps won’t automatically handle multiple languages – you’ll need to implement some hreflang tagging instead. Before we get on to incorporating these on your site, here’s a guide to how they work.
Definition and Purpose of Hreflang Tags
Hreflang tags are HTML attributes that specify the language and regional targeting of a webpage. Their purpose is to help search engines understand which language and region-specific version of a page to show users, making search results more relevant. By adding hreflang tags, search engines can better understand the variations in your pages for different languages and regions.
How Hreflang Tags Work
Search engines use hreflang tags to match the correct language and regional version of a page to the user’s query and location. There are four main methods of implementing hreflang tags, with three ways requiring some technical knowledge and coding:
- HTML tags within the <head> section of a webpage.
- HTTP headers for non-HTML files like .htaccess.
- XML sitemaps for scalability and flexibility, particularly for large websites.
- Use website translation software, such as Weglot.
Importance of Hreflang Tags in Sitemaps
- Improving user experience: Hreflang tags ensure users are directed to the most relevant version of a page, reducing the need to browse or type in search terms.
- SEO benefits: These tags give sites an SEO advantage, as search engines can better understand your content, and rank it accordingly.
- Avoiding duplicate content: Hreflang tags help prevent duplicate content issues by indicating to search engines which version of a page to index and rank. This is especially important for multilingual websites where similar content exists in different languages.
Best Practices for Hreflang Tags
When implementing your own hreflang tags, be sure to follow these tips:
- Use absolute URLs in hreflang tags to avoid errors.
- Specify correct language and region codes, if applicable, (e.g. en-US for American English, en-GB for British English, fr-FR for French in France, fr-CH for Swiss French).
- Ensure that all URLs specified in hreflang tags are valid and accessible.
- Include the x-default hreflang value to handle cases where no specific language/region matches.
- Maintain consistency across all pages and languages to avoid duplicate or missing tags.
Implementing Multilingual Sitemaps on WordPress
Site admins have a few options available when it comes to adding multilingual sitemaps – the traditional manual version, or using an SEO plugin in combo with a multilingual tool.
Manual Sitemap Creation
One option for implementing multilingual sitemaps is to generate and edit the XML sitemap manually to include hreflang tags. While this approach allows for complete control and precision, it’s a complicated process that takes a lot of time, requires regular maintenance, and can introduce errors to your site.
To manually create multilingual sitemaps, you can use online sitemap generators or directly write/edit the sitemap XML files for each language, such as sitemap-en.xml, or sitemap-fr.xml.
Alternatively, you can use hreflang attributes within a single sitemap to ensure your multilingual pages are properly linked. This helps search engines understand the region/language you are targeting and the relationship between different language versions of a page.
Enhancing WordPress Sitemaps with SEO Plugins
To improve your site’s multilingual SEO, SEO plugins can be used to generate, manage, and optimize XML sitemaps. These automate the process of creating sitemaps, making it easier to ensure your content is found by search engines.
Popular SEO plugins like Yoast and XML Sitemap Generator for Google come with advanced sitemap features. For example, Yoast supports different post types and offers extensive SEO assistance in addition to generating maps. However, these plugins do not natively handle multilingual sitemaps. Instead, they integrate with multilingual plugins to give users a much easier option than the manual method.
Automate the Process Using Weglot
Once sitemaps have been created, multilingual plugins like Weglot are designed to handle multilingual optimizations effectively. Dedicated tools help you create and manage translations, including automatic hreflang generation for each language, greatly simplifying the process of creating and managing multilingual sitemaps.
Weglot integrates with WordPress and Yoast, automating the implementation of hreflang tags, reducing manual workload, and minimizing errors. This leads to improved search engine visibility, efficient management of translations, and a great user experience for international visitors.
Editing your sitemap using Yoast and Weglot is easy!
- Install and activate both plugins on your WordPress site.
- Once you’ve installed and activated Yoast, go to Yoast SEO > Settings and scroll down to APIs > XML Sitemaps. Flick the switch to enable Yoast’s sitemap feature.
- Return to the dashboard and set up Weglot by choosing your original language and target languages, then customize the language switcher. The switcher allows website visitors to change language, if they want a different one to that served automatically.
- Weglot will automatically detect the URLs of your translated pages and add the appropriate hreflang tags to your sitemap.
- Check your sitemap to ensure that the hreflang tags are correctly implemented for each language version – Weglot comes with a useful Hreflang Checker to ensure everything’s been set up correctly.
Should you need to make changes, check out our guide to editing your sitemap (hint: this is also easy!).
How Do I Submit My Multilingual Sitemap to Search Engines like Google?
Submitting a multilingual sitemap helps search engines accurately index the correct language versions of your site, boosting your international SEO. Plugins with sitemap features integrate with webmaster tools like Google Search Console to make submission simple:
- Sign in to Google Search Console.
- Select your website property.
- Click on Sitemaps in the sidebar.
- Enter the URL of your sitemap, ensuring it includes the language tag (e.g. https://www.example.com/fr/sitemap.xml for the French language version).
- Click Submit.
Et voila! Once you’ve completed these steps, Google will be aware of your multilingual sitemap and can efficiently index the various language versions of your website.
Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
Although combining SEO and multilingual plugins is a highly-effective method for handling your international sitemaps, it’s useful to be aware of the following pitfalls:
- Not submitting the sitemap to search engines: Failing to submit your sitemap can prevent search engines from correctly crawling and indexing your site, leading to poor rankings and reduced visibility. Avoid this by submitting your sitemap through tools like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools once it’s created.
- Crawl issues: Common crawl issues include too many 301 redirects, slow page loading speeds, and blocked JavaScript and CSS files. To identify and resolve these problems, perform regular crawl audits using tools like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console. Addressing crawl issues ensures that search engines can better understand your site’s content.
- Outdated sitemaps: Outdated sitemaps can deliver irrelevant search results that mislead both users and search engines. To prevent this, regularly update your sitemap to reflect any changes to your website, including new language pages, updated content, and removed pages. Remember, multilingual plugins like Weglot can automate the translation and updating of sitemaps, ensuring they are always accurate and current.
- Inconsistent structure and content: Inconsistencies in the structure and content of your multilingual sitemap can confuse users and search engines alike. Maintain a consistent URL structure across all language versions and ensure that they are properly linked and indexed. Weglot helps ensure consistency by automatically adding hreflang tags and managing translations across all language versions of your site.
Drive your global SEO performance to new heights with Weglot
As we’ve seen, hreflang tags play a major role in optimizing international SEO, as they direct search engines to the appropriate content for users across different languages.
Weglot simplifies the implementation of these tags, with options to generate unique URLs for each language, reducing duplicate content issues and improving search engine rankings. By using Weglot to handle your sitemaps, you’ll be reducing your manual workload, minimizing errors, and improving your global search rankings.
Master multilingual SEO with a translated website thanks to Weglot. Try Weglot on your website with our 10-day free trial!
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Article by
Merve Alsan
Creative Content Manager at Weglot. Making our content all nice and shiny since 2020.
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