Handling multilanguage content is one of the most challenging tasks for a WordPress plugin – I will share my advice on how to turn WordPress into a simple multilanguage CMS, with decent SEO, in minutes. I’ve been experimenting with different plugins and my own SEO add-on, and found a viable solution for most tasks.
qTranslate is a great solution for creating a multilanguage blog/website. I’ve experimented with it quite a bit, and absolutely love it.
It works right out of the box and allows you to easily manage your content and add languages when you want – it is a “plug and play” solution, making WordPress a multilingual CMS in minutes! There is a big flaw unfortunately, especially if you care to optimize your pages and posts for the search engines: no support for meta-tags. Too bad! This made qTranslate useless to me, and to many people too. We try to solve this flaw with a simple plugin.
BTW…I really hope Matt Mullenweg will eventually decide to make WordPress natively multilingual!
Let’s go back on topic.
TITLE and DESCRIPTION – All SEO-savvy webmasters know the importance of hand-tailoring these important bits of information.
[If you're asking why no KEYWORDS...you might find out why asking a good SEO - it's completely useless nowadays.]
The problem I found with the qTranslate multilanguage plugin is the lack of meta tag support; no way to customize the post/page TITLE and DESCRIPTION meta tags: the usual beloved HeadSpace is not (yet, we all hope) compatible with qTranslate, nor it’s alternative All in One SEO pack – well, some folks have been able to make it work but I don’t like the solution, looks rather fussy to me, and error-prone.
It only handles posts and pages, and it has no user interface – you just manage it via the standard custom fields mechanism built into WordPress. If you are not familiar with custom fields please google thoroughly before seeking help here. I assume you are already familiar with this here.
The plugin works only if you have qTranslate installed – I’ve tested it on current versions (qtranslate 2.6.4 an WordPress 2.7.1) only but it might work well also in older setups.
Instructions:
- Install and activate plugin (make sure qTranslate is already active!)
- No setup required. You’re done!
- Every time you want to have a custom title or description for a post/page, edit the post, scroll down to the custom fields, and create a custom field with the appropriate name:
- title_en for english page title
- title_fr for french page title
- ….
- desc_en for english description
- desc_fr for french description
Usage
This screenshot speaks more than a thousand words – click it to enlarge.
This is what your custom fields should look like in a post where you have an italian and english version, and you want to specify a custom title and description tag for that specific page:
Warning/Caveats
If qTranslate is not up and running, qTranslateMeta will crash your blog. But hey, no problemo - you need to disable it the hard way – just erase the plugin with your FTP, and put it back in place later. Then reactivate qTranslate – and reactivate qTranslateMeta at last.
Download
Feedback
Please, I want to hear from you!
Comments welcome!
Cool! i’m gonna use this for a project soon
Hello, I’m using qtranslate for my blog and I decided to try your plugin, so I downloaded it and tried to install it, but I get an error. I used the installation utility from wordpress, so I selected the zip file of the plugin, and it unzips the php file, but then I get the error:
Plugin file does not exist.
Could you tell me how to fix this, thank you.
Sorry. Found out how to fix it, it has to be uploaded in a directory with the same name, so just as a suggestion, the files in the zip file could already be inside a directory, so the wordpress installation utility would work just fine.
I’m new to wordpress and still getting to know the system but Im starting to get inquiries for multi language cms sites based on wordpress… so this is more than handy.
many thanks on my behalf.
Thanks for the post – thats what I’ve been looking for – optimize multilingual wordpress mit meta tags.
Great
Thanks
Heiko
Hi,
What about for using more than 2 languages.
I’m building website with 4 languages … It seems I need of 12 custom fields for all meta tags and titles. It’s hard for maintenance.
That’s what I’ve done:
Forget about any SEO plugin. Just use the custom fields: one for “description” and one more for “keywords”. The “title” comes with the page. I have used qtranslate function for multilingual output:
qtrans_useCurrentLanguageIfNotFoundUseDefaultLanguage(get_post_meta($post->ID,’description’,true));
The entry at the custom field “description” looks like this:
English descriptionFrench description.
It isn’t more time consuming, is it?
Chears
Kris
Sorry, it was not my fault:
The entry at the custom field “description” looks like this:
English descriptionFrench description
Sorry, it was not my fault:
The entry at the custom field “description” looks like this:
< ! – - : en – - >English description< ! – - : – - >< ! – - : fr – - >French description< ! – - : – - >
It will be great if you could make it compatible also with the other multilangual plugins like zd multilang
Hello.
I’m using qtranslate and i’ve just tried to intall your plugin. I can’t make it work. When i try to create the custom fields for each languaje it sais there is an unknown error. I’ve tried to upload the plugin in a directory with the same name (i tried “qTranslateMeta” and “qtrans-metatags”) but it still doesn’t work.
Could anyone help me? Thanx.
I found your blog by chance . but i have to say that it’s great blog very useful information and very interesting subjects just greetings and good luck
i’m not going i will be always checking for updates.I’m very interested in CMS and all its related subjects.
Hey, sounds like a good solution to a really major issue. Any one tried this with the latest version of WordPress 2.8? I’ll give it a go within the next few days and post back with what happens.
It works very well so far on my 2.8.4 WP blog. I’ll continue testing and posting my results.
Thanks
THANKS
really thanks!
FRom seo point of view you really made my life easier !
is there a way to create also keywords tag for each language?
Hey guys!
This has been fixed in the latest version of qTranslate you no longer need to use qTranslatemeta
Just thought I’d tell you.
Great job.
Latest version of qtranslate seems to solve this issue, but with this plug-in is much easier.
The email download is kind of a turn-off. Plus, the email I got was categorized as spam.
Everything works great!! But why there in keyword custom field. I had to add them manually.
Because the keyword meta tag is now useless to search engines.
It is nice that somebody has given to itself the trouble. WordPress in several languages and with Metatags Able of SEO has made.
It looks good, but when you create a website/blog for a client you cannot ask them to use the “custom fields”.
I’d rather prefer a plugin that makes “All in one SEO plugin” (or other) multilungual, so the user authors will see the SEO fields separated in tabs for every language.