How to SEO your page language

Search engines are pretty smart but why make life harder. Here I'll show you how to tell a search engine what language or languages a page on your website is using.

Declaring the main language of the page

This is almost the very first thing your code should declare so right up at the top should be something like:

Which tells search engines the main content of your page is delivered in English. To check if your website is using the language declaration

1. Find a blank space on the page and right hand click.
2. From the small popup menu that appears left hand click on 'View Page Source'.
3. Eeeeek!? Don't be phased. Hold down Ctrl and F at the same time and look for a small search box that will appear in the bottom left or top right
4. Look at the first line of code, does it look similar to the example above.

WordPress includes it as standard but you might see a slightly different set up:

Which means English language site using the US version of the English language. That's fine as well.

Other languages on the page

If a page has a mix of languages each one should be declared in the code like this:

In Wordpress or other similar platforms don't try and add this in the main text editor. Click the 'Text' tab (top right) first and then add it