Learn How to Do Multilingual SEO Using Yoast and WPML

⚠️ Please note that you need to install and activate the WPML SEO plugin for full compatibility.

In this short tutorial, you will learn how to optimize your multilingual website for search engines using Yoast and WPML. Want to get into Multilingual SEO and make your multilingual website rank better on search engines? This video is for you!
You will learn how to:
► 0:51 -- Set the global SEO attributes for the default language
► 1:14 -- Translate Yoast global attributes.
► 2:12 -- Translate pages and posts SEO attributes.
► 3:15 -- Remove the category base from the URL on WPML multilingual sites.

🔹 Introduction and setup
The Yoast SEO plugin is a great tool that allows you to control and tweak the SEO attributes of your site and add essential SEO information to your pages.

In this video, you will learn how to translate Yoast SEO textual attributes using WPML.

You need to have the Yoast SEO plugin activated along with the WPML core plugins.

In this tutorial, we are using the Advanced Translation Editor which greatly enhances the translation process by providing machine-translation and other tools. You can activate it by navigating to WPML - Settings. Under the How to translate posts and pages section, choose to use the Advanced Translation Editor.

🔹Translating Global SEO attributes and breadcrumbs
To set up the global SEO attributes templates for the default language go to the SEO ► Search Appearance page.

Additionally, you can enable breadcrumbs, set the anchor text for the homepage, choose the separator, and set other textual breadcrumb elements.

To translate the global SEO attributes and the breadcrumbs textual elements, navigate to WPML ► String Translation and display the strings under the admin_texts_wpseo_titles text domain. Here are the global post title and meta description. Let’s translate the post meta description. Click the Translations link and add the translated content. Mark the translation as complete and Save. When translating the title, make sure to preserve the title template variables. Of course, you can translate any static text that you added to the title template. Simply, copy the title template variables and paste it into the translation field then translate the static text that you appended. You can follow the same steps to translate the different title templates, meta-descriptions, and breadcrumb textual elements.

🔹Translating Pages and posts SEO attributes
Now let’s see how to translate the posts or pages SEO attributes. When editing a page, you can set the title, meta-description, and the focus keyword from the Yoast SEO meta-box. We have already set them for our page here. To translate the page content along with the SEO attributes click the + icon in the language box. This takes you to the Advanced Translation Editor. As you can see the SEO textual attributes show on the top. Let’s add the automatic translation. And we have everything translated! Review the translation and make sure it is accurate. Now, click Finish then Complete to publish the translation.

Let’s go to the secondary language page editing screen. You can see that the SEO textual attributes are translated. If you navigate to the advanced section, you will notice that the non-textual settings are synchronized between the translations.

🔹Removing the category prefix from the URL
Yoast allows you to remove the category base from the URL. You can find this option by navigating to the SEO ► Search Appearance page and clicking the Taxonomies tab. And there it is! If you choose to remove the category prefix, it will break the secondary language category archive page. Let me show you what I mean! This is the movies category archive page in the default language. If you switch to the secondary language, you can see that the page is not found.

No problem, let me show you how to avoid breaking the category archive page in the secondary language when choosing to remove the category base. Go to the WordPress admin and choose the keep option then go to Plugins ► Add new and search for “No Category Base (WPML)”. We have already installed and activated it. Finally, you should save the permalinks.

Let’s check the secondary language archive page on the front-end. Everything works as expected!

With that, we learned together how to translate Yoast SEO textual attributes using WPML.

Thanks for watching and see you in the next one!

📝See the full documentation page on our website:

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Connect with us:

[WPML]

⚠️ Please note that you need to install and activate the WPML SEO plugin for full compatibility.

[hamadk]

How to generate sitemap for different languages separately

[ArshadKhan-dbdl]

Is it work with free Yoast SEO plugin or just just with Pro?

[Olegstuff]

Sorry, but the WPML doesn't seem to be available anymore on Wordpress - do you have any information on that?

[aaluproduction]

configuring plugins are much easier in polylang.

[евгенийтарасов-ян]

Briefly about how SEO transistor works.

Relevance=semantic (semantic or textual) component*trust to this information (trust aka PageRank).
Usually, the search engine to assess the relevance of the site uses both factors equally. However, which of the two will be the main in the evaluation, you can specify the search algorithm yourself and give the desired factor up to 95% of the significance relative to the remaining.
This relationship is controlled by the structure of the site.

That is, you can create 2 sites with different structures, one of which will be evaluated exclusively by trust, and the other exclusively by the semantic component.
Referring to a link from one such site to another, we MULTIPLY both factors on the acceptor, which will cause a strong rise of the acceptor site in the search results.

What is better than the option in which the multiplication occurs directly on the same site?
The fact that in the latter case, this is all over. I. e. the site will receive some assessment of relevance and ALL, there will be no further movements.