New Study Reveals One-Third of International Websites contain hreflang Errors

As an ecommerce business there are numerous factors that you need to keep in mind in order to maintain steady profits.One of the most integral parts of success of any ecommerce business is their online visibility. To make sure your business is bringing in regular profits, it needs to be visible. A dynamic online presence is important for the growth of your business. To make sure of that you need to have a website that is SEO friendly, with SEO optimized content. To ensure  that your website follows SEO friendly practices investing in an ecommerce SEO company might be a good idea.

There are many things an ecommerce SEO company can help you with. One such thing to take care of is the smooth functionality of your hreflang tags. Hreflang tags in a website are essentially signals that allow a website to customize its content language in accordance with the geographical area of the url. For example if the original contents of a language are in english but a person based in France opens that website then correctly coded hreflang tags allows that person to read the website content in the French language. Let’s explore the most common hreflang errors.

1. Confusing Instructions

One of the most common hreflang errors is formatting the codes with confusing directives. These conflicting instructions are usually a consequence of a webpage having numerous hreflang tags for multiple languages and locations. This error occurs when multiple URLs are assigned to a particular region or language. This sends a conflicting signal to search engines causing confusion. According to a recent study this error is seen in around 31.02 % of websites.

2. Lack of Self-Referencing Tags

This particular error can be observed in around 16.04 % of the active hreflang tags. With missing self-referencing hreflang tags, that indicate to a search engine that a webpage isavailable in multiple languages, many ecommerce businesses miss out on potential customers. An ecommerce SEO agency can help you get around this error.

3. Incorrect Language Codes

Another commonly occurring error, as seen in around 8.91 % of hreflang codes is usage of incorrect language codes. Many times a language or region is assigned an incorrect  code. This can usually occur due to lack of knowledge of correct codes. As sometimes the obvious seeming code but might not actually be the correct one.

4. Incorrect Region Codes

This particular error is observed in around 1.6 % hreflang tags. This error occurs when the hreflang tags assigned to a same language for different regions contain incorrect  region codes. This error can be easily taken care of with the help of ecommerce SEO experts.

5. Irregular Combination

This error can be seen in around 22.46 % of hreflang tags. This error is generally a consequence of using incorrect combinations of languages for a particular region.

Conclusion

Optimizing your website and web pages by using SEO friendly practices is an excellent way to ensure visibility and sustain profits. But taking into considerations all the technicalities of optimizing content as per SEO guidelines can prove to be taxing. Therefore it is best to invest in an ecommerce SEO company, whose experts have the technical know-how when it comes to all things SEO related.