SEO Recipes

Recipes for Search Engine Optimization using Polyglot

If you have installed the jekyll-polyglot gem, these additions to your site head can easily provide your jekyll blog with Google-powered SEO bonuses.

HTML Language Declaration

Per W3C Internationalization Best Practices you can set the default language of every page with a meta tag. Just add the following to your head:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="{{site.active_lang}}">

Multi-language SEO using hreflang alternate tags

You can easily add hreflang alternate tags to your site, achieving SEO with google multi-language searches. Add the following to your head:

<link rel="alternate"
      hreflang="{{site.default_lang}}"
      href="http://yoursite.com{{page.permalink}}" />
{% for lang in site.languages %}
{% if lang == site.default_lang %}
  {% continue %}
{% endif %}
<link rel="alternate"
    hreflang="{{lang}}"
    href="http://yoursite.com/{{lang}}{{page.permalink}}" />
{% endfor %}

All of the above

You can get all of the above with a single tag added to your head.html:

{% I18n_Headers https://untra.github.com/polyglot %}

Just add the permanent url for your website and all of the above SEO will be added to each page in your website. In version >= 1.2.4, you can leave it empty, just calling

{% I18n_Headers %}

and it will default to your site.url

With this SEO, each page click for one sites language will count towards the net clicks of all languages on the website.