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The higher your website’s SERP ranking, the better your traffic gets, which eventually leads to better conversions. Speed and effectiveness are driving factors that make a website stand out. This is heavily dependent on the kind of front-end technology that is used. Amidst all this, React-driven websites and applications have steadily become popular as one of the most reliable technologies.
Earlier, search engines did not embrace libraries like React due to their inability to render JavaScript. However, with technological advancements, it is now possible to render JavaScript, resulting in faster website optimization.
Let’s dive deep and understand the best practices to make your React website SEO-friendly. But first, let’s see how choosing React impacts your website.
Why Should You Choose React?
React is a JavaScript-based popular tech for creating SPAs and static and dynamic web apps. It has become the first choice for brands like Instagram and Facebook for their website development.
Apart from offering simplified code processing and stability, the framework provides a workable development toolset. As a front-end technology, React code is flexible and easy to maintain due to its modular structure. Also, it allows you to reuse components and offers a DOM architecture that makes complex apps run faster.
JavaScript SEO Challenges
JavaScript and SEO don’t go much together. Compared to indexing an HTML page, indexing a JavaScript page is complicated because it involves many added steps. This leads to increased indexing time, which impacts the SERP ranking.
JavaScript and HTML have different approaches to handling errors. If an error is detected in JavaScript code, indexing a website is difficult. Also, the JavaScript parser is sensitive to error scope; if it reads the character at an unexpected place, it will halt the parsing of the script, displaying a syntax error. If so, a Google bot crawling your site will see empty content and index it similarly.
Some major challenges that one faces during SEO optimization are:
Challenges in SEO Optimization
JavaScript rendering
One of the biggest challenges of React SEO is that it uses JavaScript to render content. This means the content of JS sites may be difficult for search engines to read. Google indexes JavaScript sites, but it takes longer for them to reach these pages. Search engines prioritize a seamless user experience, which is why you should focus on the Best React SEO practices.
Loading time
Loading time is another vital factor for a site. If your site does not load in two or three seconds, the visitors will leave it. Now, loading JavaScript takes more time as JS makes network calls for the content execution and then loads. So, the user will have to wait for the request to be processed, which can be frustrating. Also, this can lower the Google bot rank of your website.
Metadata issue
Meta tags are helpful as they allow Google to show thumbnails, titles, and descriptions. The sites that rely on the head tag of the fetched webpage to get information do not execute JavaScript for the target page.
React does render the content, including metatags. However, since the app shell is similar to a website, it may be tricky for Metadata to adapt to individual pages.
But now React SEO has some clever tricks up its sleeve that we can leverage to highly and efficiently optimize its SEO efforts. Let’s look at them.
Best Practices to Make Your React Website SEO-friendly
Build dynamic or static web applications
Google is unable to fetch single-page applications, making SEO optimization tricky. Here’s where you use dynamic or static web pages. Static websites appear the same for every user, whereas dynamic websites appear different for different visitors. These pages use server-side rendering, which can help Google bots crawl your site quickly and it’s easy to reach the target audience.
If every page of your site offers something valuable, you can create a dynamic website for users. However, for promotion purposes, stick to the static website.
Don’t use hashed URLs
The Google bots don’t see anything after the hash in URLs. For SEO optimization, the URL link is enough for the bot to crawl, minus the hash part. For instance, after the domain name, don’t use # and then the section name.
URL cases
URL affects the SEO part, and it does in React as well. Google does not consider separate pages with uppercase and lowercase. URLs are considered different due to case differences. You can avoid blunders and errors by generating URLs in lowercase.
404 code
Data issues can give you a 404 error, and that can happen with any page. It usually happens when a user tries to access a website that does not exist. To avoid this error, you can set up a file in route.JS or server.JS. When you update the file, it can improve the traffic on your website or application.
Use <a href>
Another issue with SPAs is that they use <div> to change the URL. Though not a framework issue, it’s an inbuilt fault. But when the Google bots process and search for URLs for optimization, they search for more URLs to crawl within <a href>.
If the <a href> element is missing, the Google bots won’t crawl the URL, affecting your website’s traffic. The best thing you can do is define the <a href> link, which will help Google bots see and fetch different website pages instantly.
Use isomorphic React apps
If you want apps to work on both the client and server sides, consider isomorphic React applications. Isomorphic JS can fetch rendered HTML, which the browser can render. With client-side scripting, the app can use HTML files and continue to operate on the same browser. Also, you can add the data using JS if required. These apps ensure the clients can operate the scripts or not. When the JS is inactive, the code is rendered on the server, and the browser can fetch text in HTML and CSS.
Non-React SEO Considerations
You can consider some non-React SEO factors for optimization, such as
- having a proper URL structure to give search engines a sense of what they can expect on the web page.
- optimizing for robots.txt files can help search bots understand how to crawl a web page.
- using a CDN for static assets like CSS, JS, and fonts can reduce the load time. Loading time is an important ranking factor for SEO; do consider it.
Pick an ideal rendering strategy
The way React renders the site content matters a lot. For this, it is essential to pick the right rendering strategy. Google can render JavaScript, but unfortunately, other search engines can’t. Many SEO tools can help render pages, but Ahrefs is the best tool you can trust. Ahrefs renders 200 million pages a day, making it the best tool for rendering. Rendered content can also impact the load time.
Work on essential site elements
Following good SEO practices will make a difference in ranking. However, ensure that your React web applications follow the best practices, and for this, you can work on essential site elements.
- Structured data and XML sitemaps are two significant elements you must consider.
- Additionally, mobile-first design and website structure play a vital role in optimization.
- Many developers emphasize working on title tags, canonicalization, semantic HTML, and HTTPS to optimize SEO.
All these elements contribute towards improving your website’s rank in SERP.
Wrapping up
The issues with React SEO optimization should not stop you from using React for web apps. You can use the above solutions positively for search engine optimization.
Also, search engine crawlers are smart today, so optimization is not tricky anymore. Consider smart changes and strategies the next time you optimize React for SEO. Also, follow these best practices that can elevate your efforts.
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