Javascript SEO – Best Practices on JS SEO for Beginners

JavaScript is a programming language that is used by many well-known organizations across the world. However, some unique issues can arise while working with JavaScript SEO websites. Hence, there are certain JS SEO best practices to follow when working with SEO JavaScript projects.

The interaction of JavaScript and SEO is a long-debated topic. Understanding the SEO basics has become an important task for SEOs. Most websites use the JS programming language, as it makes an excellent framework to develop web pages and controls different page elements.

The JS frameworks were implemented on the client side while inviting trouble in rendering. Additionally, now developers are pairing JavaScript and SEO best practices for boosting the SEO of web pages or websites written in JavaScript. Let’s learn more about JavaScript SEO best practices.

What is JavaScript SEO?

The term- JavaScript SEO includes everything one needs to perform to make a JS website perform well in the search engines. JS SEO is a specialization stream of the mainstream called Technical SEO.

Common features and functions that are included in JavaScript SEO are:

• Correctly implement the lazy loading feature
• Optimizing content that is injected using JS
• Follow best practices for internal linking
• Finding, preventing, and fixing JS

Why is JavaScript SEO important?

Developers prefer JS and rave on different JS frameworks and libraries like Vue, Angular, React, Backbone, etc. They love JavaScript because it allows them to build highly futuristic web pages that end-users love to interact with.

SEO experts will tell you that JS is sometimes horrible for your SEO, and they will also say that JS is important for them and will show you some statistics showing the sharp minimizing of traffic when a website starts to rely on client-side rendering.

Both things said are right.

Simultaneously, when developers and SEO experts work productively and cordially, they can get great results in the website’s performance. When the focus is on developing the best experience for both browsers and visitors, even JavaScript websites can perform well in the console.

For a website that is reliable on JS and wants to perform well on the web, search engines must fully understand what web pages are about and what indexing and crawling guidelines are in the primary HTML response.

What are the JavaScript SEO Issues?

Internal Links

Besides injecting content in the Document Object Model, JS could impact the crawlability of the links. Crawling links on web pages helps Google to get new addresses for new pages. Google especially recommends linking pages with the anchor tag (<a></a>) of HTML with the ‘href’ attribute and also including descriptive anchor text for mentioning hyperlinks.

Google will not navigate from a single page to another page as a frequent user would. Instead, it will download a page version, which means it may not make any changes on a page, which depends on what happens on the previous web page. Check if this link is affected by this or not.

Yes, if the link depends on the action, Google may not find this link and won’t be able to search all web pages of the website.

Navigation issues

With JS SEO, the website navigation is not crawlable. This also means that navigation links aren’t in bond to maintain the web standards; hence, Google may not see or heed them because:

The authority of the website isn’t distributed appropriately. It is more difficult for browsers like Google to discover internal web pages. Making relations between different pages of the same website is still unclear. This may result in a site with different links that Google is unable to follow.

Content Duplication

There are probabilities of different URLs for the same content uploaded with JS, which can cause content duplication errors. This can be the result of capitalization, IDs, parameters with identifications, etc. To eliminate content duplication, one can download the HTML before being sent for the rendering process.

The HTML response along with the app shell describes very less code and content. Every page on the website will display the same code that could be shown on different websites.

In some examples, this can cause web pages to be considered duplicates and not allowed to go for rendering accurately. The worst output can be that the wrong website might appear in the search results. This issue will be solved on its own but can cause issues in newer websites.

Client-side Rendering

Websites built using React, Angular, Vue, and other JS frameworks are set with default client-side Rendering (CSR). However, the question is- Google crawlers cannot view what is written on the page. They can view only a blank page.

These are some JavaScript SEO issues that may cause trouble for your JavaScript website. Now, we will discuss some JavaScript SEO best practices that can help you solve these issues. Let’s see which best practices are worth implementing.

JavaScript SEO Best Practices

Here are some primary JavaScript SEO best practices that developers should follow while making JS-reliant websites:

Involving important content in HTML response

If you cannot prevent your pages from being rendered by search engines, you can at least make your important content like meta elements and title the part of <head> tag of HTML and other essential body information loaded using JS.

This data should be included in the initial HTML response. It enables Google to get a good impression of your web page.

Avoid situations where browsers have to render your web pages

Based on primary HTML response, web browsers are required to be able to fully understand what the pages are about and what are your indexing and crawling guidelines. If web browsers can’t, you will have a tough time in ranking your page competitively.

Add navigational elements in the initial HTML response

Every navigational element of your project should be added to the HTML response, such as main navigation, sidebars, footers, and more sections if involved in your project. The footer contains essential links that reference different web pages of the website.

Especially in eCommerce sites, the pagination feature is important. While infinite scrolling makes a super cool user experience, it might not perform well for web browsers, as they will not interact with your web page. So, they cannot trigger any events required to load more content.

Here is an example of what you should not do, as it requires Google to render the page to search the navigation link:

<a onclick=”goto(‘https://abcexample.com/shoes’)”>

Rather than the above link, do this:

<a href=”https://example.com/schoes/”>

The link attribute value of rel=”nofollow”

The same goes with adding rel=”nofollow” attribute value to links using the JS. The Google crawler will only collect these links and add them to the Crawl Queue. These links get crawled earlier than Google can render the web page, ultimately resulting in the discovery of rel=”nofollow”. Again, this leads to confusion and waste of the crawl budget.

Another way of having rel=”nofollow” link attribute value only making it or removing it with JS won’t work, because Google adheres to the most restrictive directive- that opens in the next tab.

Remove render-blocking JS

Render-blocking JS is a code that decreases the speed of rendering web pages. This process is a bad influence from a UX point of view, and also from an SEO pov because you want your web pages rendered quickly by Google. But render-blocking JS makes the process slow. So, removing this code is necessary.

To remove extra network requests, one can use inline JS. Other than that, you can also apply a lazy loading feature for easy SEO of your JS website.

Let search engines access your JS files

Make sure that you are not preventing search engines from accessing the JavaScript files of your project by using a robots.txt file; stemming from the situation where search engines are unable to understand and render your pages.

Leverage lazy loading and code splitting

For instance, if your home page relies on JS code, and other pages use limited JavaScript, then it is not worth if you only load all “homepage-only”

JS files when any page on the site is requested.

So, on top of that, you can use code splitting to load the JS that is needed in the right way and use the lazy-loading feature for the rest of the code. This helps you with enabling loading your pages smoothly and becomes more interactive.

Optimize your images

If images are the essential part of your brand, like representing products on any eCom website, that you want to get indexed, you have to optimize them for the search engines’ sake.

Add images as per the web standards

Link the images in your web page using the ‘src’ tag of HTML, and consider taking advantage of native lazy loading of browser-level images. 

Server-side rendering

Implementing these best practices allows both users and Googlebot to get a fully rendered HTML of your website from the server.

The major SEO benefit of having your content available on the server is that it’s faster and easier for different bots to process the pages. Simultaneously, server-side rendering improves the process of indexing and analyzing your pages.

Server-side rendering is also a solution for presenting JS content to Google.

Optimizing your rendered HTML that helps Google select your content

Monitor the DOM and page source of the web pages and pay attention to the following points:

• Canonical tags
• Crucial content
• Structured data
• Internal linking
• Important tags like hreflang tags or meta robots.

It might happen that JS doesn’t evolve much, and you wouldn’t even notice these changes visually. However, it changes your metadata which has the potential to lead to some serious issues.

Concluding Words

Implementing the JavaScript SEO best practices mentioned above will help your JS website grow organically and rank on search results. Still, there are many best practices available to implement. If you want to know more about remaining best practices, stay tuned with us. Happy reading and happy learning!