SEO (search engine optimization) is important for businesses to be visible in search results. React applications can be challenging for SEO because search engines cannot see content rendered by JavaScript. Some key challenges are delays in indexing content, slow page loads, and inability to read metadata and create sitemaps. Techniques like prerendering, server-side rendering, and tools like React Helmet and Next.js help make React apps more SEO-friendly by rendering content on the server so search engines can index pages fully.
AWS Community Day CPH - Three problems of Terraform
How to make React Applications SEO-friendly
1. How to make React
Applications SEO-friendly?
https://fibonalabs.com/
2.
3. Before making SEO-friendly React application, let’s know what exactly SEO is,
why it is so important to consider while building the applications and why it is
challenging to optimize these Single page applications like SEO-friendly React
apps.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search engine optimization. SEO is the practice of improving
quality traffic to your website when people search for products/services related
to your business in Google and other search engines.
4. Why is SEO so Important?
In this competitive world, SEO marketing is very important for our business.
Search engines serve millions of users daily based on users' queries. So, our
website/business must stand out in search results when users try to find related
information about our products/business
How Google Crawls and Indexes Web Pages?
As we know Google is one of the popular search engines and the majority of
online users use it. So, let's have a look at how google crawls and indexes web
pages.
6. 1. Crawling: Crawlers like Googlebot search the internet for new and
updated websites with the purpose of identifying their contents. Crawlers
find new pages when they follow links from sites they already know. They
also crawl sitemaps and web pages offered by managed web hosts.
2. Indexing: Indexing Once Googlebot finds new pages, Google tries to
understand what these pages are about. While Google can understand the
contents of images and videos, it understands text best. Take advantage
of meaningful titles, headings, proper meta descriptions, and topical
content so that Google sees what you want it to see on a particular web
7. Challenges In Optimizing React Apps for SEO
There are several challenges that one can face to build an SEO-friendly React
app. Some of them are discussed below:
● Delay in content fetching
1. As we know React applications rely on JavaScript, and they often run into
problems with search engines. The initial HTML does not contain any
meaningful content, and a user or a bot must execute JavaScript to see
the page’s actual content.
2. It means that Googlebot detects an empty page at first and then the
8. This will result in a delay in the indexing of content when dealing with
thousands of pages.
● Load time of web page
1. Fetching, parsing, and executing JavaScript takes some time. JavaScript
may need to make network calls to fetch the content, and the user may
need to wait for a while before they can view the requested information.
2. Google has laid out a set of web vitals related to user experience, used in
its ranking criteria. A longer loading time may affect the user experience
score, prompting Google to rank a site lower.
9. ● Page Metadata
1. Meta tags are helpful because they allow Google and other social media
websites to show appropriate titles, thumbnails, and descriptions for
pages. But these websites rely on the head tag of the fetched webpage to
get this information. These websites do not execute JavaScript for the
target page.
2. React renders all the content, including meta tags, on the client. Since the
app shell is the same for the entire website/application, it may be hard to
adapt the metadata for individual pages.
10. ● The Inability to create built-in Sitemaps
1. A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos,
and other files on your site and the relationships between them. Search
engines like Google read this file to crawl your site.
2. React does not have a built-in way to generate sitemaps. If you are using
something like React Router to handle routing, you can find tools that can
generate a sitemap though it may require some effort.
How to Make SEO-Friendly React Apps?
Some methods that contribute to making an SEO-friendly React app are:
12. ● To make a SPA (Single Page Application) visible for crawlers to use pre-
renderers: programs that can detect Googlebot requests. Once a pre-
renderer understands that a bot is crawling your site, it provides the bot
with a static HTML version of your SPA from the server so the bot can
index it. But how does an HTML page appear on the server? In the case of
pre-rendering, all HTML pages are preloaded and cached in advance with
Headless Chrome, a tool that helps software engineers effortlessly work
with server environments.
13. ● You might want to opt for pre-rendering because it’s easy to implement.
You generally don’t need to make any changes to the existing codebase,
or if the need does arise, the changes will be minimal. Finally, pre-
renderers can transform any JavaScript code into static HTML files.
● However, you should keep in mind that pre-renderers are paid tools and
might not work well with websites whose data frequently changes.
➢ Isomorphic React: The Isomorphic JavaScript Technology has an
automatic capacity to detect whether JavaScript on the server side is
enabled or not.
14.
15. In cases where JavaScript is disabled, Isomorphic JavaScript works on the
server side, thus providing the concluding content to the client-side server.
All the required content and attributes become readily available once the
page starts to load. However, when JavaScript is enabled, it performs like
a dynamic app having several components. This enables faster loading
compared to the conventional website, thereby leaving the user with a
smooth experience in the SPAs.
17. ● If you wish to build a React Web application, you need to have a precise
knowledge of client-side rendering and server-side rendering. Client-side
rendering is a Googlebot and a browser that receives empty HTML Files
having less or no content.
● Subsequently, JavaScript code downloads the content from the servers
and allows users to view it on their screens. However, client-side rendering
faces several challenges concerning SEO. This is because Google
crawlers cannot view any content or view less content that is not indexed
appropriately.
18. On the contrary, with server-side rendering, the browsers and the Google
Bots receive HTML files along with the whole content. This assists Google
bots in performing indexing and ranking higher without any hassle.
Some React SEO Tools
● React Helmet
➢ This is a library that enables developers to set the HTML metadata in the
header of a component. With this tool, one can easily update the meta tags
on client-side as well as the server side.
19. ➢ React Helmet supports every valid head tag including meta, title, script,
noscript, style, link, and base; server-side rendering; and every attribute for
title tags, body, and HTML. Moreover, it enables callback from tracking the
DOM alterations. The nested components override the duplicate
modifications in the head and these duplicate head modifications are
preserved when they are specified under the same component.
➢ This tool not only makes your web app SEO and social media-friendly, but
also facilitates modifying the title, metadata, and language of the page. We
can combine server-side rendering with React Helmet for the best results.
20. ● React Snap
➢ This tool is responsible for pre-rendering a web app into static HTML using
Headless Chrome for crawling all links starting from the root. Zero
configuration is the main feature. You do not need to worry about how it
works or how to configure it.
● React Router
➢ This is a component for creating routes between the various
pages/components and makes it possible to develop a website having an
SEO-friendly structure thus helping in building an SEO-friendly React app.
21. ● Server-side rendering with Next.js
As we know Next.js is one of the popular frameworks built on React which
supports SSR. So, let’s have a brief look at how Next.js works. Next.js is a
popular framework that helps you develop React apps that work on the
server side efficiently and quickly. It enables automatic code splitting and
hot reloading. In addition, this framework can provide full-fledged server-
side rendering, which means HTML is generated for each request when
the user makes a request.
22.
23. Due to this, Next.js has become the ideal choice for solving the SEO
challenges of a React app with dynamic data. However, for utilizing server-side
rendering on React, developers will also need to use the Node.js server
capable of processing requests on runtime.
Key Features of Next.js
● Facilitates full-fledged server-side rendering
● Supports static page generation at build time
● Supports Hot Module Replacement – seeing all changes in real-time.
● Intelligent enough to load only required CSS and JavaScript.
24. ● It comes with many ready-to-use components.
Conclusion
While developing applications with React, we should be careful about the
website structure, what pages are loading, the loading time, and how long it will
take the search engine bots to crawl and analyze the pages. Single Page
Applications offer a seamless user experience, a native-like feel, and improved
performance, and they should not be disregarded just because of the SEO
challenges.
