Multilingual website SEO: hreflang, copy, and one subject per URL

Do not serve English and Turkish in the same HTML with a client-only switch that search engines cannot fetch as separate documents. Give each locale a stable address. On this studio site English lives at the root; Turkish, Spanish, and German use a prefix.

Each page still needs a subject. The Turkish services URL should explain services in Turkish search language. Copying the English heading and hoping is how four thin pages compete with each other.

Every language version should list itself and the others, plus x-default on the locale you treat as fallback. If Turkish points at English but English ignores Turkish, the signal is incomplete.

Canonical tags should point each locale at itself. Pointing every language at English tells search engines the translations are copies. They may drop them from the index.

US buyers search “custom website design.” Turkish buyers search “özel web sitesi” or “web tasarım ajansı.” German buyers use compounds such as “individuelle Website.” Write those pages from the market brief, not from a translated keyword spreadsheet.

METEK engagements that need more than one language produce independent copy. The studio site follows the same rule. That is slower than machine translation and the only way the page can answer the query it claims.

The XML sitemap should list the canonical URL for each locale and include xhtml alternate links between them. Internal links on a Turkish page should stay in Turkish unless you are explicitly sending the reader to another market.

Language switchers need crawlable hrefs, not click-only scripts. If the only path to /de/services is a JavaScript widget, a crawler may never store the German page.

List the markets, the default locale, who writes each language, and whether URLs already exist. Rebuilds need a map so old language folders do not 404.

If you only need one language now, ship that well. Adding locales later is normal. Adding four machine-translated shells on day one is not multilingual SEO.