Introduction:
The relationship between JavaScript and SEO has been a long debated topic and understanding the basics of java has become an important task of SEO professionals. Most of the developing websites use JavaScript as its programming language. It uses excellent frameworks to create web pages and also controls the different elements in that page.
JS frameworks were first implemented only on the client side of the browsers while inviting much trouble in client-side rendering. In recent times, it is been embedded in host software as well and on the server side of web servers to reduce the pain and the trouble. This initiative has also paved the way in pairing JavaScript with SEO practices so as to enhance the search engine value of the webpages written in java.
How JavaScript Affects SEO?
The relationship between the two was not clearly understood in the virtual world for years. Before a decade, it was a famous practice to create webpages with JavaScript without having a clear idea of its impact on search engines in phrasing and understanding the content. Search engines also were not able to process the JS content adequately.
As time went on Google changed its standpoint on processing websites written in JS. There was tremendous doubt if the search engines would be able to crawl the JS websites and if Google will be able to rank such websites. Websites with JS has exceptional benefits coming along their way, they have excellent load time, faster servers and the code functions can run instantly without waiting for the server to answer. It was easy to implement JS websites that have a richer interface and versatility as well. But JavaScript SEO brought a lot of problems along the way and the webmasters failed to optimize the content that is based in JS codes.
Search engines such as Google were not able to crawl JavaScript codes but are able to index it and rank it. Now webmasters have to think of ways to make it easy for Google to understand the generated content and help it rank the webpages in search engines. There are lots of tools and plugins that have come in the way in this approach.
How Google Reads JavaScript?
As discussed, it is pretty tough for Google to crawl the webpages that are written in JS codes. The crawling process is all about new discoveries and the process is complicated. It uses web crawlers or spiders to accomplish the function. Googlebot is one of such popular crawlers that treat websites like 301 pages from the indexing standpoint. Such indexed URLs are replaced by the redirected URLs.
Googlebot identifies the web pages and follows the links in the pages until the point where the web pages get indexed. This is accomplished by using a parsing module, which does not render pages but only analyzes the source code and extracts the URLs found in the script. These web spiders are able to validate the HTML codes and the hyperlinks as well. Googlebot can be helped by informing which pages to crawl and which not to follow as well by using a robots.txt file.
By this method, the crawler gains access to the code data of the web page. The robots.txt file can be used to instruct Google on which pages we want our user to see and which, not to gain access to. The same file can be used to avoid ranking drops and errors and to enhance the speed of bots too.
How to Make Your JavaScript Website SEO Friendly?
In the beginning, Search engines were not equipped to handle websites based on AJAX and JS scripts. The system was not able to understand the pages written on these codes suffering both the user and the website. A modern-day SEO professional should understand the basis of the document object model to explore and analyze the web pages before ranking them. From 2018, Google did not require AJAX to render JavaScript web pages.
After receiving the HTML document and identifying its JS elements, the Google browser initiates the DOM, enabling the search engine to rank the webpage. Some initiatives in making the JavaScript webpage SEO friendly are,
1. Making the JS pages visible for search engines:
Robots.txt file offers enough crawling opportunities for search engines and blocking them would make the page appear different for web crawlers. Thus, search engines cannot gain complete user experience and Google may consider such actions as cloaking. It is important to render all the resources for web crawlers to see the web pages in the same manner as that of the users.
2. Internal Linking:
This is a strong SEO tool to build the architecture of the website and project some important web pages to the Search engines. These internal links should not be replaced with JS on-clicks. Internal links can be built with regular HTML or DOM tags for better user experience.
3. Structure of the URL:
JS websites include fragment identifies with their URLs such as hashbangs and lone hashes which are strictly not acceptable by Google. It is recommended to use APIs as they update the URL in the address bar and allows the JS websites to leverage clear URLs. A clear URL is search engine friendly as it is understood even by non-technical users.
4. Testing the website:
Though Google is able to crawl many forms of JS web pages, some of them seem more challenging than others. Thus it is important to test the website to predict possible problems and mistakes and to avoid them. It is important to check if the content on the webpage appears in the DOM. Few web pages should be checked to ensure if Google is able to index the content.
5. HTML Snapshots:
Google still supports HTML snapshots, though it suggests these as elements to be avoided. These will be important at instances if the Search engines are not able to grasp the JS on the website. Returning HTML snapshots to search engine web crawlers is better than the content being rejected altogether.
However, only do so in cases where there is currently something not correct with JavaScript and it isn’t possible to contact your support team.
6. The latency of the website:
When a browser creates a DOM with HTML document, massive files exist on top of the document and all other information appears later. It is desired to lead information that is crucial for the users first. The most essential information should be on top of the fold to avoid site latency and to make the website SEO friendly.
Principles of JavaScript SEO:
The following are the principles of JS SEO
1. Accomplish server-side rendering:
whatever tech is been used with server rendering, it has to be made sure that a universal approach is used. It also makes it easy to render apt pages for web crawlers to list in search engines.
2. Swapping image galleries:
Most of the website developers tend to improve their performance by incorporating a lot of images. But search engines would rely on the images and render them image specific traffic. For rendering all images, website developers have to use an architecture using jQuery to control what is been shown in the search engines.
3. Deal with tabbed content:
There is a tendency with websites to have a single block element that swaps the content in and out, but it also means that content only in the first tab gets indexed and others won’t. Apart from pages in the return polices and privacy statements, other important content of the website should not be framed under this category.
4. Contents that are paginated:
Only the first appearing data in the webpages are indexed and the rest are not. So content on the other pages should also be linked with the URL that is easily resolvable by search engines to link.
5. Metadata:
Updates with metadata and their routing can be nightmares for JS oriented websites. Solutions such as Vivaldi are fine as it allows prompt metadata creation both in the initial loads and its navigation pages. There is also consistency in user experience to navigate between pages and thus google considers them for ranking.
The Basics of SEO for JS Frameworks:
The fundamentals for SEO of JavaScript frameworks can be listed as follows. These core principle elements will help in resolving any issues and questions that are faced by the webpage developer in indexing the ranking of JS content in search engines
- Contents that are framed with the load event should be indexable
- Content that is depended on the user events are not indexable by the search engines
- Pages require an optimum URL along with server-side support for search engine rankings.
- It is important to inspect rendered HTML element using SEO practices as that of traditional pages.
- It is important to avoid contradictions between HTML versions.
Implementing JavaScript implementations for SEO websites does have some risks and requires the user to learn on core principles and revise website implementations as well. Risk tolerance is an important feature while implementing SEO for JS. But it is possible to migrate the entire website from HTML and get them rank in Google with time and adequate tests.
JavaScript SEO Best Practices:
A number of search engine crawlers have difficulty crawling JS based websites and as result brand managers and web developers stop creating web pages in java based platforms. But indeed some of the JS-based websites are excellent with adorable user experience. It is high time that we get SEO work strategically with JS and help website developers and end users take the best advantage of what technology has to offer them.
One of the best practices of pairing SEO and JS is page rendering on Google Search. This is because search engines crawl the rendered pages rather than the source codes. A lot can be missed by considering only the source codes and crawling such rendered pages is time-consuming and provides little value for the information.
Googlebot makes use of a rendering service from the web which is the optimal location to optimize a website. The URL structure is the first interesting thing that attracts crawlers when accessing a page. One best practice of JS SEO is to get the website URL accessible for search engines. JS webpages tend to use a lot of hast tags and anything that is after a hashtag is not sent to the server and identified by Google. The best alternative for this is hashbang that tells Google to consider the URL. One way to enable website crawlers to track the URL is to use clean URLs with webpages and leverage on the push State function of the website API.
Using internal links that can be crawled and followed by the search engines is also a good practice. Internal linking throughout the website will help in the best SEO practices and also gives an opportunity to promote the content of the web.
Speeding up the content load times is an efficient SEO practice in JS pages. Metadata is the best tactics here as it offers a lot of information in a particular location of the site and also facilitates excellent navigation. Tabbed content may also be used to speed up load times. The content on the second, third and the fourth tab can keep loading while the user is still navigating the first tab. But when google lands on those pages where the content is hidden then it will escape from search crawlers. Thus the best practice is to create independent pages for each of those tabs.
Conclusion:
For business success, the websites have to ensure that the audience is able to access and read the content. For easy accessibility, Google has to rank the pages on top of the search engines. There is ample technology to ensure that the website looks great. But if the search engines will not be able to access that content, then web visibility will drop too many folds. Thus, SEO needs to work and adapt to the limitations of technology so as to enhance visibility and traffic for business profitability.