The Best SEO Friendly Practices That AngularJS Developers Need to Follow

Sep 7, 2021

AngularJS is one of the most popular frameworks, and you have taken the first step in the right direction in building your website with AngularJS. It can also be used to build large-scale applications that offer advanced functionality and scalability. AngularJS is also one of the preferred choices for creating single-page applications (SPA). Being a user-friendly platform, businesses like Forbes and BMW are already using it.

With SEO assuming a lot of importance in visibility and awareness of a brand online, you also need to focus on it as well. It will help you maximize your digital investments. But how do you go about doing that? This article looks at SEO best practices you can follow to make the most of your website.

AngularJS and SEO: What Does It Look Like?

AngularJS applications run on the client-side by default. When your AngularJS app starts, an empty HTML shell is the first thing that will get loaded. It comprises a script that is responsible for rendering the content and populating the page with it. Your single page application can face SEO-related issues. It happens only when web browsers and crawlers understand texts and everything else after they render JavaScript.

Keeping this in mind, Google launched the AngularJS 11 and subsequent versions with default libraries that support SEO-friendly measures. Developers can edit and set the meta tags in libraries in two ways. They can do it through the application itself or use AngularJS Universal in a pre-render mode.

The MVC Architecture of AngularJS helps developers save time and avoid tedious work.

Importance of Making Your AngularJS Website Crawler Friendly

Search engine crawlers are vital as they browse through URLs to understand the content and add it to their search index. These are nothing but scripts and programs. When you populate your website with content and make it live, search engine crawlers scan it to understand your content goals.

It helps them in matching your content to queries users post online through search engines. If you have a website that crawlers can index easily, it will have a better chance of ranking in the search results. Better positioning in search results will lead to improved traffic to your website. It will ultimately improve customer enquiries, chances of conversions, and overall revenue growth.

SEO-related Challenges Faced by AngularJS Websites

Here are some prominent challenges faced by AngularJS websites.

Content not scannable by bots

AngularJS apps need explicit instructions to reload web pages. However, AngularJS supports the dynamic changing of the metadata of web pages through JavaScript. But JavaScript and search engine crawlers do not work well. It leads to a situation where the content or its metadata does not get rendered. The bots will fail to pull the data from the source.

AngularJS does not support storing data on the source as it happens via API connections. The crawlable content does not remain on the actual code of pages. As opposed to HTML-based websites, SPAs only store the basic structure of web pages. So, search engine crawlers cannot scan the website as the source code does not contain any HTML code.

Low loading speeds

AngularJS websites aren’t usually speed optimized. It is one more reason why they are not SEO-friendly in the first place. For sure, they are user-friendly, robust, and scalable. However, they lack in this aspect. Before the home page gets rendered, those websites load as blank screens. It can lead to high bounce rates as users might not have the patience for the page to load completely.

AngularJS gives highly efficient user interfaces without any extra costs to businesses.

How to Overcome SEO-related Challenges of AngularJS Websites

While there are conflicts between SEO and JavaScript, there are solutions as well. As AngularJS is a popular JavaScript framework, its developers have realised the issues and have come up with effective measures. Here’s how you can overcome SEO-related issues with your website.

Dynamic Rendering

One of the significant issues with AngularJS is that the data gets fetched through API calls. There aren’t any HTML files that search engines can crawl. When you use a dynamic rendering tool, it allows the creation of static HTML files. Web crawlers will prefer it much as it will be easy to read and index the content.

It is an easy workaround to the problem of indexing content. You can also configure the web server to enable directing web crawlers to pages that already got rendered. So, your website visitors will get redirected to your regular AngularJS website.

Metadata and Titles

Web crawlers pull data from the metadata and titles of web pages. You can add and modify the metadata and page titles with the help of AngularJS modules. You can make these changes dynamically. So, once you make the change, you can check the browser tab tile to see how it changes as you navigate through different pages.

There will also be related metadata once you check the code in the browser console. But the page source content remains the same. So you can create metadata and titles dynamically when you permit JavaScript. Pre-rendering is the step where the content of the rendered pages gets shared with users.

Leveraging AngularJS Universal

AngularJS Universal enables the easy rendering of AngularJS apps on the server. When a new user visits your website, the tool makes it easy for the server to pre-render your AngularJS app. There are also several benefits associated with using AngularJS Universal for SEO. Furthermore, you can also expect an improvement in the accessibility and performance of your AngularJS application.

Who We Are and What Makes Us a Preferred AngularJS Partner?

If you are looking to leverage the robust and open-source AngularJS framework for mobile and web apps, getSmartCoders can help. We have more than seven years’ experience offering custom mobile and web app solutions. You can expect excellent functionality and ease of use for your website users.

Want to know more details about our AngularJS development services? Get in touch with us right away.