Should We Add the W3.org Language Tag To Every Page Or Just The Home Page?

[CSawatzky]

Greetings,

We have five international sites around the world, two of which are in difference languages. Currently we have the following line of html code on the home page of each of the sites:

Clearly, we need to change the "en" portion for the sites that aren't in English, but, should we include that meta tag in each of the site's pages, or will the home page suffice. Thanks!

[artdivision]

Hello,

Index page will be more than enough. Also the fact that the language is non English is now sufficient enough for google to understand and list the web site to the relevant country directories.

Best of luck!

[CSawatzky]

Thanks, Yiannis

I definitely see higher rankings and traffic for the sites that have the specific language tag.

Does anyone else have other input to provide?

[gfiorelli1]

Google doesn't care the W3.org language tag (Bing does it, instead).

Said that using it on every page is a good practice for W3.org, hence do that.

For Google, if the site is using a Country Code Top Level Name (i.e.: .it, .fr, .de...), then the site will be automatically target the country related to the domain termination (i.e.: .de > Germany and just Germany, not Austria or any other German speaking country).

If the site is under a generic domain name (i.e.: .com), then you have to specify in the Google Webmaster Tools setting of the site what country (hence regional Google) you want the site itself to target.

NOTE:  if you are targeting language and not countries, don't use ccTld domain names, because, as I said before, those domain names targets only the country the domain termination is paired to.

Then... use the hreflang="x" markup so to suggest to Google what URL must be shown to the user depending on the language they use (check this official Google page).

Finally, do a great localization of the content and try to obtain authoritative quality signals like links from local sites and social shares from local users.