Hi Eric,

I would recommend the Yoast WordPress plugin available at http://yoast.com/wordpress/. This plugin covers pretty much all the SEO issues you'll encounter in WordPress, plus there is a handy tool that will analyze important text fields in your posts to see if your articles are optimized for the keywords you're looking to rank for. This plugin won't put heading tags in the template, but I think it's worth a look.

Another consideration for WordPress is your permalink URL structure. As of WordPress 3.1.2, there is a definite performance issue when starting the permalink structure with either the category, tag, author, or postname fields. You can read more under "Structure Tags" at http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks. I'm not sure how this affects SEO, so it'd be great to get some feedback on ranking results using different WordPress URL structures.

I thought about a subdomain, but I think it would complicate things from an SEO standpoint. From what I've learned, a subdomain here would get treated as a separate domain and send link juice to an English page that wouldn't be accessible to visitors direct (only within another Chinese page as a lightbox). I'm sure there's a cleaner way to do this.

What I'm looking for is ranking effects of using the Lang element or ATTLIST declaration with lang element to identify various languages on the same page. Or if there is any other way to let search engines know I'm using multiple languages on a single page, it'd be a super time saver.

Thanks for all your input so far!

Thanks for the input Ryan. My challenge here is that both languages will be used on nearly all pages site wide. I'll look deeper into the JS lightbox method, but my initial thoughts are that the html would appear in multiple places on the site, and I'm not sure how search engines will treat an English document inside a Chinese document. Of course my priority is usability, but as I go through the design process, I was just hoping to find a way to get the search engines to count content in both languages toward SEO ranking.

I am working on a language teaching site for Chinese speakers learning English. I consider myself above average when it comes to basic SEO issues, but all I know here is that Google doesn't like multiple languages on a single page.

Without getting into too many details, both Chinese and English text will appear on the same page with links, tags, phonetic spellings, etc.

I'm hoping someone here knows the science about using the lang="zh" xml:lang="zh" attributes within text and the effects on ranking for text within the declarations. And it'd be great if there was clarification on the link juice passed using the hreflang attribute for both internal and external links. Also, of course, any info on using both English and Chinese characters in the URL would be most helpful. A heads up on any other language specific SEO issues would also be much appreciated.

My goal is to get the most out of both languages per page in terms of ranking.