Going multilingual is a real SEO opportunity, but only if the technical foundations are right. Miss one of these and you can end up with the wrong pages ranking, duplicate-content confusion, or translated pages that never get indexed. Work through the list.
1. Pick a clean URL structure
Use language subdirectories (/de/, /fr/) unless you have a strong reason not to — they keep authority on one domain and are simplest to run. Compare the options with the URL structure previewer.
2. Set the correct lang (and dir) attribute
Each page must declare its language on the <html> tag: <html lang="de">. For right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew, also add dir="rtl" and mirror the layout.
3. Implement reciprocal hreflang with x-default
Every page needs a complete, reciprocal set of hreflang annotations — including a self-reference and an x-default. Build them with the hreflang generator and confirm with the hreflang checker.
4. Get canonicals right per language
Each language version should have a self-referencing canonical pointing at itself — not at the source-language page. Pointing all versions at one canonical tells Google to ignore your translations.
5. Translate titles and meta descriptions
Don't leave English titles and meta descriptions on translated pages. They're what users see in search results — translate them, and translate your Open Graph and Twitter Card tags too. If you use Yoast or Rank Math, make sure their meta is translated rather than duplicated.
6. Provide language-aware sitemaps
Include all language URLs in your XML sitemap, ideally with xhtml:link alternate annotations so search engines discover every version.
7. Use readable, localized slugs
Give each translated page a clean, transliterated slug rather than a percent-encoded mess — especially for non-Latin scripts. The slug generator helps.
8. Translate structured data and alt text
Product, article, and FAQ schema should reflect the translated content, and image alt text should be localized too — both feed search understanding and accessibility.
9. Don't machine-translate and forget
Review the strings that carry the most weight — navigation, calls to action, titles, and legal text — for the right register in each language. Protect human edits so a re-sync never overwrites them.
10. Verify indexing per language
After launch, check in Google Search Console that each language version is being crawled and indexed, and that hreflang isn't reporting errors.
Make it automatic
Most of this list — hreflang, canonicals, translated meta, sitemaps, lang/dir, localized slugs — can be handled for you. Gloty generates it automatically for every page, so multilingual SEO is a setup step, not an ongoing chore. Start with the pillar guide on making WordPress multilingual.