How to get ranked in google.fr for mixed language pages?

[epmaniac]

i have an english site of different personalities of the world.....

now i am putting in few french people biographies etc in there

i dont think i would get ranked in google.fr if the content is french but marked by

meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en"

so should i mark these few pages as

meta http-equiv="content-language" content="fr"

so that they get ranked in google.fr

my 99% of the site is in english,... only few of these pages would be in french,..... would this approach be ok?

[tedster]

Yes, the language mark-up is page specific, not site-wide.

[WallyHancock]

I would suggest starting a .fr domain for French content.

[phranque]

it might also help to put the french content on subdomain such as fr.example.com that is geotargeted in WMT.
and inbound links from french sites couldn't hurt.

[epmaniac]

if the language markup is page specific, and with the geographic targeting potential that is attached with it, why isn't it more often used...... i mean, why in a non subdomain site, different pages are not targeted according to different languages more often?... dont u think it is a cleverer idea compared to creating an independent subdomain for every region/country/ language?

what could be merits and demerits of this approach?

[phranque]

content is targeted to language.
spanish and french are the official or primary language in dozens of countries each.
with GWT you can only geotarget one country per (sub)domain/subdirectory of a gtld.
cctlds are implicitly geotargeted.