<...lang=...> Tag

I'm creating a site in English and German language
www.richardlevy.net.

The site content is served in the target language by PHP.

Is it better to give the keywords and descriptions in all languages on
all pages or to serve the keywords in the language fitting for the
page?

TIA


Rich


// Tell the search engine where to find the version in another
language (British English, German, American English
echo "<link lang=\"en\" title=\"".$pagetitle." type=\"text/html\"
rel=\"alternate\" hreflang=\"en\"
href=\"index.php?l=en&p=t&d=".$domain."&f=".$page. "\" xml:lang=\"en\"
/>";
echo "<link lang=\"de\" title=\"".$pagetitle." type=\"text/html\"
rel=\"alternate\" hreflang=\"de\"
href=\"index.php?l=de&p=t&d=".$domain."&f=".$page. "\" xml:lang=\"de\"
/>";
echo "<link lang=\"en-us\" title=\"".$pagetitle." type=\"text/html\"
rel=\"alternate\" hreflang=\"en\"
href=\"index.php?l=en&p=t&d=".$domain."&f=".$page. "\"
xml:lang=\"en-us\" />";


// Include Keywords
// echo "<-- For speakers of British English, German & American
English -->\n";
echo "<meta http-equiv=\"keywords\" lang=\"en\" xml:lang=\"en\"
content=\"";
include 'keywordsen.inc';
echo "\" />\n<meta http-equiv=\"keywords\" lang=\"de\"
xml:lang=\"de\"content=\"";
include 'keywordsde.inc';
echo "\" />\n<meta http-equiv=\"keywords\" lang=\"en-us\"
xml:lang=\"en-us\"content=\"";
include 'keywordsen.inc';
echo "\" />\n";

RichardLevy (AT) gmx (DOT) net (Rich) wrote:

I'm creating a site in English and German language

The most important thing is to link the different language versions to
each other using explicit <a href="..."> links. Use descriptive link
texts, not things like "Translate this Page". Make sure the other version
works before linking to it.

More on multilingual sites: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/multi/

Is it better to give the keywords and descriptions in all languages on
all pages or to serve the keywords in the language fitting for the
page?

Rather irrelevant. Meta tags for keywords and descriptions are mostly an
exercise in futility, since they are largely ignored by search engines
due to widespread abuse ("spamdexing").

But if you use them, they should naturally be page-specific, so the
English version should have English keywords only, etc. Otherwise, in
rare case where the keywords have any meaning, they would _mislead_
users. They might get the wrong language version and decide that the page
is not relevant and was found by error only (or thanks to spamdexing).

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html