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Aniruddh Agarwal for Extern Labs Inc.

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Will my AngularJS Web Applications be SEO Friendly

AngularJS is a great option for developing Web Applications; it has many functionalities like HTML extensions for single-page applications. But the one question that has to be asked; Will google crawl my AngularJS application? Single-page applications are becoming more efficient and effective with their specialty to adjust on any screen size. These days most people use mobile phones for their day-to-day web browsing and single-page applications work best on mobile devices and additionally you can use your single-page application and build a native or hybrid mobile application.

Big names like Youtube, Netflix, PayPal; Use AngularJS for their progressive web application. AngularJS can efficiently build single-page web applications and progressive applications containing many images and elements with fast and interactive user experience, and ultimately more traffic. Traditional websites containing individual pages are considered good for search engine optimization but angularjs applications might not be as profitable in terms of SEO. You can use some technical tricks to affect google crawling and indexing on your web application and get your name on search engine results pages. First, let’s know more about AngularJS.

How to make AngularJS App SEO Friendly

JavaScript is a more advanced language than HTML or PHP, it makes web development more advanced, innovative, and stunning. JS made development faster and products are appreciated by users but it made things complicated in search engine optimization. JavaScript pages are faster than google’s crawlers; They can't process and render content developed on JS because pages written on javascript load faster than google’s bots, they reach to read the pages but pages load up and they don’t even get a chance to render source codes. Google updates its algorithms and optimization techniques but still, it faces many challenges. Google has been trying to improve its ability to crawl and index web pages and applications built on javascript and they made some improvements yet still they couldn't make it. You will need an expert AngularJS Developer who can build SEO-friendly web applications.

Let’s check what we have to do to make our AngularJS web applications search engine optimization friendly and easier to be crawl by google bots.

Optimize AngularJS Application for SEO

Every SEO expert have their own style and strategy of search engine optimization that they have mastered in their career; Here are 4 major technical methods to improve SEO for your AngularJS Application

Use Google CodeLab and utilize #PushState to change the URL
Google CodeLab opens developers to the mandatory SEO elements that might require in page rendering. It allows using #PushState and History API to change URLs and adds important elements on the pages via DOM including metadata, descriptions, and tags which makes all links appear on the code base and dynamical load of content.

This will increase the time of rendering and loading the content. Necessary elements will load faster but it will affect some UI elements to appear at their fullest. When you are using this method then you have to customize your analytical metric to secure and record each visitor and data.

Server-side rendering with Angular Universal

Another method to make angularjs SEO friendly can use Angular Universal Extension to create static versions of web pages that can be rendered on the server-side. Google’s bots can easily reach and crawl them and provide indexes to your pages.

Dynamic rendering

You can create a flat HTML version of your angular website which is called dynamic rendering and use this version to submit to google for crawling and indexing. According to Google,”Googlebot generally doesn't consider dynamic rendering as cloaking. As long as your dynamic rendering produces similar content, Googlebot won't view dynamic rendering as cloaking.”

Which means they allow us to create extremely fast versions for SEO while we can design our UI and UX as we want.

There are some tools that can help you do that or you can Hire a dedicated Developer to help with that.

Initial Static Rendering

With this method, we can leave some critical elements on the server side including - titles, metadata, descriptions, header footer, etc. This will allow these elements to appear on the source codes and google’s bots will be able to crawl those easily.

The real differentiator between dynamic rendering and initial static rendering is that it will render the first view of your app in a back end and deliver a static HTML and then for each subsequent visit it will load the version with the JavaScript framework.

This method is good but it requires google's crawlers to visit your web application more frequently, which can lead to some loop stuck, glitch from their side.

This method can provide an initial render on the first crawl visit.

Final Thoughts

AngularJS and Web Application is a new and appealing way to impress users but it also comes with its disadvantages. Now we know these core methods that will help you get the initial index on SERPs and with an SEO expert, you can gain your desired place on the SERPs. This will be hard and long, but at the end of this initial work, you can get better engagement and results.

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