⚠️ 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:
â–ş 0:51 -- Set the global SEO attributes for the default language
â–ş 1:14 -- Translate Yoast global attributes.
â–ş 2:12 -- Translate pages and posts SEO attributes.
â–ş 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 â–ş 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 â–ş 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!
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