Multilingual website and hreflang: how to do SEO in several languages

🌍 Who needs several languages

Accommodation, restaurants in tourist areas, importers and exporters, clinics that receive foreigners and every company with clients outside Serbia. For most Serbian businesses these are Serbian, English and German.

🧱 How to build it properly

1. A separate URL for each language. For example /en/ and /de/, or a subdomain. Do not switch the language only by script on the same address.
2. A real translation, not machine-copied text. Adapt the phrases people actually search in that language.
3. Translated URLs and titles where it makes sense.
4. A language switcher that leads to the same page in the other language, not the home page.
5. hreflang tags that link the versions.

🏷️ What hreflang is

These are tags that tell the search engine: this page has an English version at this address and a German one at that. That way Google shows the right version to the right user.

Rules: each version points to all others and to itself, tags must be reciprocal, and x-default is added for when the user's language is not covered. Faulty hreflang is among the most common errors on multilingual sites.

🚫 Most common mistakes

• Automatic redirects by browser language that also block bots.
• Only parts of the page translated, the rest in the original language.
• hreflang pointing to a page that does not exist.
• The same content on several URLs without a canonical tag.

🗺️ Our site as an example

This site exists in Serbian, English and German, with separate URLs, hreflang tags and a sitemap linking the versions. If you need the same, see website development.