Javascript SEO – Best Practices on JS SEO for Beginners

JavaScript is a programming language used by many well-known organizations worldwide. 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 essential task for SEO professionals. Most websites use the JavaScript programming language, as it provides an excellent framework for developing web pages and controlling various page elements.

The JavaScript frameworks were implemented on the client side, which caused trouble in rendering. Additionally, developers are now pairing JavaScript and SEO best practices to boost the SEO of web pages or websites written in JavaScript. Let’s explore the best practices for JavaScript SEO.

What is JavaScript SEO?

The term “JavaScript SEO” encompasses everything necessary to optimize a JavaScript website for search engines. JS SEO is a specialization stream within the mainstream field of 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 JavaScript and rave about various JavaScript development frameworks and libraries, such as Vue, Angular, React, and Backbone. 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 decline in 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 relies on JavaScript 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 included in the primary HTML response.

What are the JavaScript SEO Issues?

Internal Links

Besides injecting content into the Document Object Model, JS could impact the crawlability of the links. Crawling links on web pages helps Google discover new addresses for newly created pages. Google especially recommends linking pages with the anchor tag (<a></a>) of HTML, using the ‘href’ attribute, and 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 to a page, depending 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 bound 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. The relationship between different pages of the same website remains 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 file before it is sent for rendering.

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

In some cases, this can cause web pages to be considered duplicates and prevent them from rendering accurately. The worst outcome can be that the wrong website appears in the search results. This issue will resolve itself, but it may cause problems on 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 the 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, part of the <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 the primary HTML response, web browsers must be able to fully understand what the pages are about and what your indexing and crawling guidelines are. If web browsers can’t, you will have a tough time 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, including main navigation, sidebars, footers, and any additional sections 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 for 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 applies to adding the rel=” nofollow” attribute value to links using JavaScript. The Google crawler will only collect these links and add them to the Crawl Queue. These links are crawled earlier than Google can render the web page, ultimately resulting in the discovery of the ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ attribute. Again, this leads to confusion and waste of the crawl budget.

Another way of setting the rel=”nofollow” link attribute value, either making it or removing it with JavaScript, won’t work because Google adheres to the most restrictive directive—that opens in a new tab.

Remove render-blocking JS

Render-blocking JS is code that decreases the speed of rendering web pages. This process has a negative influence from both a UX and an SEO perspective, as you want your web pages to be rendered quickly by Google. But render-blocking JS makes the process slow. So, removing this code is necessary.

To eliminate unnecessary network requests, one can utilize inline JavaScript. Additionally, you can apply a lazy loading feature to enhance the SEO of your JS website.

Allow search engines to crawl and index your JavaScript files.

Ensure that you are not preventing search engines from accessing the JavaScript files of your project by using a robots.txt file, which can cause search engines to be 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 it if you only load all “homepage-only”

JS files are loaded 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 enable the smooth loading of your pages and makes them more interactive.

Optimize your images

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

Add images according to web standards.

Link the images on your web page using the ‘src’ attribute of HTML, and consider leveraging the native lazy loading feature of browser-level images. 

Server-side rendering

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

The major SEO benefit of hosting your content on the server is that it’s faster and easier for various 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 to help 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, such as 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.

Conclusion

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