Tips To Make Your Website SEO Friendly Using Angular

Saurabh Hooda // April 3, 2018 // 1 Comments
Tips To Make Your Website SEO Friendly Using Angular

Today I am going to discuss something which is unlike LoudTechie's regular blog posts. For this blog posts, we move away from WordPress and bring you a list of tips to make your site Search Engine Optimization friendly using the widely used JavaScript Framework, Angular.

So if you are looking for something related to WordPress, you can skip this one, but for the people who have employed Angular and wish to learn easy tips to make their website SEO friendly, this one is for you.

JavaScript

JavaScript or JS is a high level and prototype based dynamic programming language. It is extensively used to create online programs such as video games and highly interactive web pages. The majority of websites around the globe have employed JavaScript, and almost all web browsers nowadays have extended support to the language.

Due to the broad use of the language in numerous applications, certain frameworks have been developed to ease out the process of calling and using the code for the developer. Frameworks are used for their ability to increase the efficiency of the programming process with its set of well-structured prebuilt patterns and functions.

Other features of JavaScript Frameworks include their speed, ability to lower the costs of developing an application and security arrangements.

There are numerous JavaScript frameworks available to developers to help them to code and create wonderful applications, such as React, Meteor, and Angular.

These frameworks are being used widely by top tech giants and start-ups to create amusing applications and websites to stay ahead of the competition.

Angular

Tips To Make Your Website SEO Friendly Using Angular

Created by Google, Angular was release in 2009 and has emerged as the most widely used JavaScript Frameworks and boasts of the highest number of contributors on GitHub.

It can be used for mobile, native mobile, web and native desktop applications.

The biggest highlight of Angular is its ability to enable developers to quickly create features with its declarative templates. The severity of its scalability and productivity can be understood by its support to Google’s largest and highly used applications.

To learn angular, there are ample quality Angular tutorials and courses on the internet which might help you command over the language.

JavaScript and SEO: The Battle of the Mighty

JavaScript and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) have been in a battle for a long time. While JavaScript lets you create amazing products, SEO helps products reach the eyes of millions of users worldwide.

But when the need is to optimize content juiced up with JavaScript, it all comes to a screeching halt. Rendering content that was made with JavaScript has been a challenge for Google and its Googlebot for a long time. The density of the problem can be visualized by the fact that Googlebot cannot differentiate between a page that has truckloads of content only displayed using JavaScript and an empty page. This rendered optimized content useless, thus preventing websites and applications to improve their SEO.

Even though Google has come forward multiple times to ensure how they are better at indexing content based out of JavaScript, better is not a term that can describe their abilities and inabilities to render JavaScript content.

When tested, it was found out that Google could understand the content only if all of the JavaScript was included inline. After this, the escaped fragment was announced which basically meant that the Googlebot was made to see the content which it could not fully render.

In this day and age when JavaScript and its frameworks such as AngularJS are being used widely and becoming more and more powerful, Google has understood the need to investigate the matter of JavaScript content indexing.

After serious scrutiny, Google came forward in 2015 to announce that they can crawl (index) JavaScript content as long as it is not blocked by robots.txt. Robots.txt is a text file created by webmasters to instruct search engine robots how to crawl pages on their websites.

Google vs JavaScript: Can Google Do It?

There might actually be a big distance between Google’s claims on their Googlebot’s ability to crawl JavaScript and what it can actually do, but that is a debate topic for the top management.

Below is the list of some things that Google can actually crawl and read:

  • Content in Initial Page Load: Understanding JavaScript content rendering at Google is no less than a herculean task. Google is able to index content rendered in JavaScript only if it is visible upon page load to the users. If the content requires a click, it cannot be read by Google. This simply means that any content which requires a click, such as tabbed experience or an expansion based text, will most probably remain non-rendered by Google.
  • JavaScript Links: When I talk about JavaScript links which look like “javascript:openlink()” or “javascript:window.location“, it seems Google is able to read them. However, it is important to note that reading URLs is entirely different from passing PageRank thought the URLs, which might still elude Google.
Tips To Make Your Website SEO Friendly Using Angular
  • JavaScript Redirects: If I take example of two pages, viz. page X and page Y, such that the page X uses a JavaScript redirect to link it to page Y, Google will follow the redirect and drop page X out of the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) and will replace it with page Y.

It is important to note that Google skips pages that take a long time to load, which means it is better to avoid loading up a page with JavaScript content and using only the amount that is absolutely required.

How to Make Your WebSite SEO Friendly Using Angular JavaScript Framework

Up until now, I have only talked about Google and its ability to render JavaScript based pages. This is because if any search engine can render an Angular based web page, it is Google.

While Google may run it, other search engines such as Bing will surely choke. This is a huge problem as developers can lose a fair share of users due to search engines not being able to render their content.

To overcome this issue, let’s look at how to make your site SEO friendly using the all trusted JavaScript Framework, Angular.

  • Creating a Suitable Snapshot: The term to remember while working with Angular SEO is pre-rendering. As it suggests, either the page can be pre-rendered or an HTML snapshot can be created that can be served in the source code itself. It takes away the need for Google and other search engines to properly render the web pages created using Angular. This will also let multiple other search engines such as Bing and Yandex to render any content on the web page. When the pages are being pre-rendered, the content can be seen directly in the source code itself rather than requiring inspect element functionality of Google’s browser Chrome.
  • The Structure of The URL: apart from pre-rendering the content, one more key component of SEO in Angular JavaScript is creating a URL for the page which is both user and search engine friendly. Simply, it is a warning call to avoid the hash waste integrated into your URLs, which looks like ‘www.XYZsite.com/#/page’. This is one of the options for rendering URLs through AngularJS.
Tips To Make Your Website SEO Friendly Using Angular

?No matter how necessary the programming aspect of a product may seem, it is still incomplete without the optimization.

While the world is running around with technology in their palms and pockets, it is necessary to attain a good SEO score.

AngularJS is one of the many frameworks that are being used by developers to create applications efficiently and swiftly. With SEO and AngularJS together, developers can move forward taking long strides towards making an amazing product.

About the Author Saurabh Hooda

Saurabh has worked globally for telecom and finance giants in various capacities. After working for a decade in Infosys and Sapient, he started his first startup, Lenro, to solve a hyperlocal book-sharing problem. He is interested in product, marketing, and analytics. His latest venture Hackr.io recommends the best Angular tutorial and online programming courses for every programming language. All the tutorials are submitted and voted by the programming community.

Alok Rana founder of LoudTechie. Like to share his blogging experience and resources with readers. Offering best money making blogging opportunities to new bloggers. He loves to talk about how to blog, SEO, Traffic Strategies and Marketing.

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