International SEO

RTL SEO

Serving right-to-left languages correctly — Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu, Farsi — in markup and layout.

RTL SEO is serving right-to-left languages properly: Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu and Farsi. It needs dir="rtl" and the correct lang attribute on the document, a layout that mirrors rather than merely translates, and hreflang pointing at the right variants. Getting the direction attribute wrong makes text technically present but genuinely hard to read.

Definition

Right-to-left languages need more than translated strings. The dir="rtl" attribute tells the browser to lay out text and inline elements in the opposite direction; CSS logical properties (margin-inline-start rather than margin-left) let one stylesheet serve both directions.

Mixed content is where it usually breaks: a Latin brand name or a number inside Arabic text follows the bidirectional algorithm, and punctuation can land on the wrong side without explicit isolation.

Why It Matters

Arabic and Urdu are among the largest under-served search markets. A site that ships RTL as an afterthought is readable enough to publish and uncomfortable enough not to be used.

Example

<html lang="ar" dir="rtl">

With CSS logical properties, the same rules produce a correctly mirrored layout without a separate RTL stylesheet.

Mirroring is not translating

Setting dir="rtl" flips text direction, but a layout built with physical CSS properties does not follow. margin-left stays on the left in an interface that should now read right to left, so icons, indentation and arrows end up on the wrong side.

CSS logical properties solve this without a second stylesheet: margin-inline-start resolves to left in LTR and right in RTL automatically. The same applies to padding-inline, border-inline, inset-inline and text-align: start.

Directional icons need explicit attention — a back arrow must point the other way — and mixed content is the subtle case: a Latin brand name or a number inside Arabic text follows the Unicode bidirectional algorithm, which can place adjacent punctuation on the wrong side unless the run is isolated.

How SlapMyWeb checks this

The audit reads the lang and dir attributes and reports a page whose content is in a right-to-left script without dir="rtl" declared. It also validates hreflang reciprocity across language versions, which is where RTL sites most often break — an Arabic version that no other version points back to is invisible as an alternate.

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