Specifying the lang attribute for SEO purposes

Ok this might be all obvious to some of you but came as a surprise to me, but this little atttribute can have a big impact on your rankings!!

I do SEO for a few pan-european websites that are obviously in different languages. We have been struggling to get the same ranking results on the German and French version of a site although the competition for the keywords we are targetting is less than the ones we are targetting for the English site. SO why is this? I'm stunned that I missed this (it was actually a client that pointed it out to me, albeit a very SEO savvy client, thanks Paul!).

Ok you are thinking get to the point you rambling Norwegian. Basically, the lang attribute is a language code that among other things tells the search engines what language a website is in. I dont' know why I thought this would happen automatically. So if you have a german site you need to specify in the lang attribute that the content is in German if you want to rank for german keywords. Obviously if the lang attribute says "lang=en" the search engines thinks the site is in English. Doh!

For more information on the lang attribute

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