Adding Meta Languange tag to xhtml site - coding help needed
-
I've had my site dinged by Google and feel it's likely several quality issues and I'm hunting down these issues.
One of Bing's Webmaster SEO tools said my xhtml pages (which were built in 2007) are missing Meta Language and suggested adding tag in the or on the html tag.
Wanting to "not mess anything up" and validate correctly, I read in **W3C's site and it said: ** "Always add a lang attribute to the html tag to set the default language of your page. If this is XHTML 1.x you should also use the xml:lang attribute (with the same value). Do not use the meta element with http-equiv set to Content-Language."
My current html leads like:
QUESTION:
I'm confused on how to add the Meta Language to my website given my current coding as I"m not a coder.Can you suggest if I should add this content-language info, and if so, what is the best way to do so, considering valid w3c markup for my document type?
Thank you!!!
Michelle -
thank you!
-
Yeah, I don't think you'll go wrong with "en". Glad to help, hope that answers your question
-
Thanks again George. So, I guess "en" or "en-us" is ok. Most of our customers are in the US by far, but we also have a smaller percent in Australia, Canada and the UK. But they all speak English.
That being said, maybe "en" is best?
Michelle
-
At least with Google, I doubt it makes a difference unless there are multiple languages on a page. If you use Chrome you'll see it auto-detects the language and offers to translate. It may only rank the page in a specific country or locale though. If you're aiming at Spanish speakers in the UK, it may be a little different.
-
Hi Michelle, "ll-cc" stands for "language-countrycode". So in the case of English, you can use "en-us" for English United States or "en-gb" for British English. I don't believe case matters (I have seen "en-US" and "en-GB" used too).
For your question, yes you can use:
You could also use:
Either one will work fine :). Which language are you targeting?
Here is some more reading from w3.org that seems more up-to-date, though I think you would be fine using one of the above methods.
-
The Bing Webmaster Central article where they discuss how to set the language for your pages is here.
-
Hi George,
Thanks for your prompt reply - and I agree - I'm sure this isn't a big factor, but when finding reports saying things are "wrong" - I'm trying to fix them for overall improvement.I noticed w3c says: Always add a lang attribute to the html tag to set the default language of your page. If this is XHTML 1.x you should also use the xml:lang attribute (with the same value).
So, is it best practice to add it (xml:lang) to this tag you suggested (is applicable to my document)?
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">And is "en" preferred over "ll-cc"?
Thanks again,
Michelle -
This is likely what you are looking for, but I don't think this is causing you any SEO problems.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Our new site will be using static site generator which is supposed to be better for SEO?
Hi folks, Our dev team is planning on building our new marketing webpages on SSG or Static Site Generator(we are stepping away from SSR). Based on my research this is something that can help our SEO in particular for site speed (our site has a poor score).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TyEl
Are there any challenges or concerns I should be aware regarding this direction? If so what are they and how can this be addressed? Thanks0 -
Do I need to do a 301, as well as adding re-write rules on Apache
I'm sure this has probably been asked somewhere before... We're implementing a URL re-write rule to convert non dub pages to the www. subdomain and also removing all trailing slashes as part of a basic canonicalisation exercise. The question is, as well as doing the URL rewrites within htaccess, should I also 301 those duplicate pages or does the URL rewrite do the job on it's own? Thanks mozzers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ultramod0 -
Need help with Google Webmaster Tools Errors
I have a lots of error on my Google webmaster tools under Search Appearance -> Structure Data there are two sets of items 1- "hentry" and source is "Markup: microformats.org" and error says: "Missing: author | Missing: updated" 2-"hcard" and source is "Markup: microformats.org" and error says: "Missing: fn" I am using WordPress. Can anybody tell me how to fix these errors please. Thank you Sina
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SinaKashani1 -
Title tags seem to be going against Rand and suggestions here, what can I do? Can you help me please?
Hi to all, Ok so I have been beating myself up trying to figure out how to create a good ranking title for my websites homepage. My competition uses commas in its title tags But these are 100% against what Rand and many posts say here. I watched his whiteboard where he says don't use commas. There are posts that say, don't use commas. The biggest one is mortonbuildings(dot)com - followed by - lesterbuildings(dot)com They basically have the same title tags with commas. So what's the catch here? What am I missing? of course these sites have Great Domain Authority, but I swear what they are doing is going against what Rand and many other seo professional's are preaching. I thought it should read better for visitors? But to me it looks like keyword stuffing with a brand name? Any help is greatly appreciated to let me know if these commas and strategies are good to do? or bad news? Again thank you for your time to help a small business. Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | asbchris0 -
How is my 301 redirected site stealing rankings from the main site?
Hello, I have a site, drhobelt.com, that 301 redirects to the main site, drhonow.com. Not only is drhobelt.com still indexed, but it recently stole rankings from drhonow.com for "decompression belt" related terms. What could be causing this? How do I reclaim the rankings for drhonow.com? Thanks for reading!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Recovering from a site migration
Hi. I've been working on http://www.alwayshobbies.com/ for a number of months. All was fine, but then we had a site migration which involved a huge number of redirects. There's been a couple of similar moves in the past. As a result, rankings have plummeted. To resolve this, we're considering letting all the old pages 404 by turning of the redirects, and removing all links to them where we can. Some key pages could have canonicals added, but basically we're looking to purge as much as possible. Does this sound like a reasonable tactic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
Redirect help
I work for a company that has a domain that is something like www.neat-stuff.com but most people just use www.neatstuff.com without the dash. The redirect for the homepage works fine. We recently launched a new site and if you use www.neat-stuff.com/category it redirects from the old site to the new site just fine. However if you use www.neatstuff.com/category it does not properly redirect to www.neat-stuff.com/category. How do I fix that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Can someone please help me understand my sites recent loss of rankings?
My site has been top 3 for 'speed dating' on Google.co.uk since about 2003 and it went to below top 50 for a lot of it's main keywords shortly after 27 Oct 2012. I did a re-submission request and was told there was 'no manual spam action'. I have a Page Authority of 53, a regular blog http://bit.ly/oKyi88, a KLOUT of 40, user reviews and quality content. I did discover that another URL I using was set to a 302 instead of a 301 for some reason. I don't necessarily think this was an issue as Google should know which is the trusted URL and therefore which content to list. I removed this redirect completely about 3 weeks ago, but I've seen no improvement. I'm looking at improving various things, but I'm still not sure why I've been hit and wonder if I'm missing something obvious? Any suggestions greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benners0