Hello every one i have big arabic forum,my forum laguage was ar-om, i changes it to ar-sa and i noticed that i got less traffic in the last few days so what is the best for forums language? to add only the language without location? (without en-us or ar-sa) is it better to add only the original language as lang="en" or lang="ar"? and how google see lang="en" and lang="en-us" which better for google?
What country are the majority of your visitors coming from? I'm not a language or linguistics expert, but if I recall correctly, Arabic has some dialects that are unique to the country that it's spoken in, as well as the culture of that particular country. (Of course, I could be wrong here, and if I am, please accept my sincere apologies in advance.)
my forum language was ar-om and i changed it to ar-sa to get more traffic from saudi arabia but i'm asking if the lan=ar is better than lan=ar-sa and if this can get more traffic for all arabic search!
Yes, but you'd have to make sure that the pages are written in Arabic (without any regional or cultural dialects or syntax).
pages are in arabic,but i'm waiting the right answer to get the best in google result! wikipedia have this for arabic: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="ar" lang="ar" dir="rtl"><head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> HTML: so is it the best to get good result in all google domains and languages?
Yes. If you want to target a wide-reaching Arabic reaidng audience that is not limited to a particular country, the code you provided here is what you need to use.
No. Your page would appear in Arabic. You'd have to write a language speciifc version for the English pages and then serve them that way. (Notice how Wikipedia has a two letter subdomain before their domain? Such as en for English or jp for Japanese? That's what you're going to have to do, and then use IP based geo-targeting to serve the relevant page to the user depending on what part the world they're in. There are other ways to do it, of course, but that's the most well-known as far as I'm aware.)
yeah i'm with you,i have directory its lang=ar-sa and it appears in all google domains when you search for arabic keywords english or arabic!