I have an online newspaper website. The content is fully in the Bangla language. The language of the website is Bangla but visitors are searching in search engines (Google, Yahoo & Bing) in English and coming to my site.
I need to know know how to use metadata (title, meta-description, and meta-keywords) in both the Bangla and the English language for SEO purposes.
I also need to know whether using multiple languages in the metadata is harmful regarding SEO.
So you have a page with content (in the body) in one language, and you want to provide the metadata (in the head) in multiple languages.
In general this is easily possible by providing corresponding lang attributes (see an example with multiple meta-keywords in different languages), but it doesn’t work in two cases:
You can only have one title element.
There must be no more than one
titleelement per document.
You can only have one meta-description element.¹
There must not be more than one
metaelement with itsnameattribute set to the valuedescriptionper document.
Everything else that could be interesting for translation is allowed, I think.
Doing it for SEO purposes probably doesn’t make much sense, as search engine likely have no interest in showing metadata in one language if the content is in another language.
(Also note that most metadata is ignored by search engines in the first place, for example meta-keywords.)
It shouldn’t harm SEO as long as you don’t deceive with the translations, and as long as you use the lang attribute to convey in which language the metadata is.
However, it could be problematic for search engines that don’t notice the lang value difference (they might end up using metadata in the wrong language), but I don’t know of any.
¹ I proposed to allow multiple meta-description elements if they have different lang values, but it hasn’t been decided yet.
