I'm developing a website that will be translated into two languages: English and French. I'm just wondering what the best practices for such a site would be when it comes to SEO? So far, the website has two root sub-directories, which means URLs look as follows: http://www.example.com/en/home http://www.example.com/fr/accueil And in my <html> tag I specify the page language using the lang attribute (depending on which sub-directory we're in, i.e. <html lang="fr">). Will this be enough for the site to rank and be indexed correctly in local versions of Google, i.e. English pages to achive the best ranking they can on google.co.uk and the French content to achieve the best rankings it can in google.fr?
Don't forget all of the usual On-site SEO stuff like h1 tags and good meta descriptions. Use 1 to 3.5% keyword density in your content for each of your keywords. The French website should rank well on that alone, then start building some great links that are also multi-lingual. You could really diversify and see your site become an authority over a plethora of keywords. Cheers!
If English is the main market host the content in the root directory then create folders like /fr/ for the french version. Google will recognize the french content and will automatically rank the french pages.