Best practices for switching site languages around

[MattBarker]

Hi folks. The site in question is at http://bit.ly/UDV186

It is split into English and Spanish versions, each at root/en and root/es respectively. The home page is in Spanish.

We're trying to rank the site for English keywords so we want to switch the homepage to English and put the Spanish version as secondary.

What are the best practices for this? Can we just literally swap the two versions around onto the existing URLs, i.e. take the English text and put it onto the home page? Provided all links point to the correct page, would that be fine?

Are there any other best practice considerations to take?

Thanks in advance.

[john4math]

I think switching the two versions should be fine.

You can set up rel alternate hreflang tags if the content on your site is duplicate between English and Spanish.  This will help the search engines understand that these are alternate pages based on the language, and help Spanish searches get the Spanish version of pages, and English searches get the English versions.  Google talks about that here.  You can do it on the page, or in your sitemap.

You can use the meta language tags or set the language in your HTTP headers for Bing to understand what's going on (see here).

[MattBarker]

Thanks John!