What is the hreflang tag?

The hreflang tag is an indication in the code that tells search engines which language, and optionally which country, a page is written for, and what its alternative versions are.

Without hreflang, Google may show the Italian version to a German user, or treat two English pages for different markets as duplicate content. With hreflang, each version of your multilingual website is linked to the others, and the search engine chooses the one best suited to the language and location of the person searching. It is one of the technical SEO elements we set up on the websites we develop in Cantù, in the province of Como, with our enterprise CMS.

Technical SEO

The rules for correct hreflang

A few mistakes are enough to make the tag ineffective: here is what we check.

Standard codes
Language in ISO 639-1 format (it, en, de) and optional country in ISO 3166-1 (de-CH)
Reciprocal links
If page A points to B, B must also point to A
Self-reference
Each page also includes itself in the list of versions
x-default
A fallback version for users of languages not covered
Consistency with canonical
The canonical points to the page itself, not to another language
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International visibility

Hreflang, SEO and AI engines

Hreflang works together with a sitemap for each language, translated meta tags and content written for each market. A clear structure also helps AI assistants cite the page in the right language: a topic we follow with our AIO optimisation service.

Contact

Is your multilingual website set up properly?

We can check the hreflang, URLs and meta tags of your language versions and tell you what to fix, including for websites of companies between Como, Milan and Lugano.

Contact us
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It makes sense to activate the website languages of the markets where you sell or want to grow, and that you can keep up to date over time. Better to start with the priority languages done well: we discuss it with companies in Como, Brianza and Milan in Cantù, and a multilingual CMS lets you add more without rebuilding.

For most companies, subfolders for each language are the simplest solution to manage and concentrate authority on a single domain. Country domains are for a strong local presence in each country. The choice should be made at the start: we assess it from Cantù with companies in Como, Milan and Lugano.

What you need is localisation: rewriting text, examples, images and practical information around how customers in each country think and search. Units, currency, formats and local contacts make each version credible. From Cantù we follow companies in Como, Brianza and Milan going abroad.

The website copy can be written by your company, by our Cantù team, or together. The most effective approach combines your product knowledge with our experience of writing for the web, with SEO and AIO optimisation and always-reviewed AI-assisted drafts, for companies in Como, Brianza and Milan.

SEO for a multilingual website requires separate URLs for each language, hreflang tags between equivalent versions, localised content and translated meta tags. It is an important step for companies between Como, Milan and Lugano addressing several markets: this way Google shows each user the right version.

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