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How to manage multilingual SEO with Yoast and Weglot

How to manage multilingual SEO with Yoast and Weglot
Rémy Berda
Written by
Rémy Berda
Rémy Berda
Written by
Rémy Berda
Reviewed
Rémy Berda
Reviewed by
Updated on
June 26, 2023

Yoast is the leading WordPress SEO plugin with thousands of WordPress users benefiting from its simple setup and ability to make sure your site meets the highest technical SEO standards, no matter your SEO level.

For those WordPress users with a multilingual website, you may also be wondering how to make Yoast multilingual so it can also help you get the most out of your multilingual SEO.  

So, in this article, we’ll take a look at how you can use WordPress translation plugin, Weglot, together with Yoast to help you build a high-performing multilingual WordPress website.  

By using Weglot and Yoast together you’ll be able to translate all your Yoast metadata (including title tags, alt tags, meta descriptions, social media tags, and so on) and 100% of the content on your site.

How does Yoast SEO work?

First, it’s important to understand what Yoast does in terms of what it adds to the source code of your website pages.

When you create a page, there are several bits of information about the page that are “invisible” to human visitors but that are important to search engines.

Those bits of information are placed in the <head> section of your page, in <meta> tags. For example, you probably have a meta description tag where you enter a description of your page which will be used when showing your results in Search engines, like Google.

This is what a webpage looks like without Yoast:

source_code_noyoast

As you can see, there’s the <title> tag but no meta description tags.

Now let’s activate Yoast and see what changed:

source_code_yoast

Yoast SEO has added several meta tags in your webpage:

  • Meta description: This short text is used for search engine and tells what is your page about.
  • Meta og: These are meta used by Facebook (og = open graph). They are important to control what is being rendered by Facebook when someone for example shares your page on Facebook. It controls what text will be displayed by Facebook.
  • Meta twitter: This is the same as for Facebook. These tags control what is displayed by Twitter when you share a post.

Yoast SEO has automatically added tags for you. But what about your multilingual pages?

How Weglot works with Yoast

When you make your website multilingual, it’s important that meta tags added by Yoast are also present on the translated pages but also, that their content is translated.

Many multilingual plugins don’t support this but Weglot does it automatically for you, without any add-ons. Simply put, when you activate Weglot, a new URL for each language is created and the meta tags are automatically added and translated!

Let’s have a look at a translated page by Weglot:

source_code_yoast_weglot

As you can see, the <title> is translated by Weglot but also:

  • The meta description
  • The canonical link is changed
  • The og tags are correctly translated
  • The Twitter description and title are also translated

This is done automatically after you’ve added the Weglot plugin and doesn’t require any extra work. Of course, you can easily modify the translations of your meta tags in your Weglot Dashboard.

How to translate your SEO content with Yoast and Weglot

To make Yoast multilingual all you’ll need to do is install the Weglot plugin. Weglot translates the whole of your WordPress website in minutes, including any plugins you’ve added to your site, such as Yoast.

You don’t need any additional add-on packages, just navigate to Plugins > Add New > and search for Weglot.

Click on Install and Activate and you’ll see a Weglot tab has appeared in your WordPress Admin. Click on the tab for the final steps.

Sign up for a Weglot account to copy and paste your unique API key, add in the original language of your website and then add your new languages.

Click on Save Changes and your WordPress website is now 100% translated, including all your Yoast content!

The only thing left for you to do is decide whether you want to make manual edits to your metadata through your Weglot Dashboard or leave it machine translated.  

To do this, navigate to your Weglot Dashboard and your Translations tab, and click in your language pair.

Weglot Dashboard language pairs

Then, using the filter select ‘Meta SEO’ to find all the metadata you’ve added with Yoast. Click in a translation, make a change and that will then be live updated.

And, that’s it! It’s as simple as that.

There are also other multilingual SEO features that Weglot also takes care of that fall outside of Yoast, including translating your URL slugs, automatically added hreflang tags and translated image alt tags.

Want to see how Weglot works on your WordPress website? Sign up for Weglot’s 10-day free trial.

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