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 %}

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

Other SEO best practices for polyglot

• always be sure to specify <meta> tags for keywords and description of pages. Search Engines will use these tags to better index pages; for multi-language websites you should supply different values for each sub-language your website supports:

  <meta name="description" content="{{ page.description | default: site.description[site.active_lang] }}">
  <meta name="keywords" content="{{ page.keywords | default: site.keywords[site.active_lang] }}">