Many people have been talking about Angular in recent months as a way to build client apps. However, one of its most revolutionary innovations is actually happening on the server-side.
The Angular framework is a structural javascript-based framework for web applications. It is used to create dynamic web pages with content rendered via web services. Angular is very developer-friendly and has been around for several years, accumulating a powerful community of tools and utilities, including Angular CMS tools, backend frameworks, and more.
As search engines and crawlers scour the web, JavaScript frameworks like Angular are constantly evolving to adapt to their needs. You might already use common SEO techniques, but you could improve your results. Or maybe you aren't updating your CMS as often as you should, resulting in slower site performance.
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout.
Code is the building block of websites. It is written in languages. A large majority of websites are written in three languages.
Websites can customize interactive user experiences with JavaScript. Engaging websites attract visitors. JavaScript makes websites interactive.
To build a website, Angular uses JS to scale up. The Angular framework transforms a dozen lines of flat HTML sent from your server into personalized interactive user experiences.
As a result of the way they work, Angular applications using the framework are referred to as Single Page Applications. As soon as an Angular application is loaded, other pages can be rendered dynamically without reloading the entire website. The Angular Javascript framework is used for this experience. The pages are dynamically modified by javascript code or by only loading the required content. By doing so, the user won’t have to wait for reloading.
Here’s what we need to understand about search engine crawlers (or bots) before we can come up with a solution. Your website pages and the end goal of your business are indexed by search engines all over the world. In order to accomplish this, crawlers read the metadata of the pages, such as the title, description, image tags, and categories. To allow search engines to understand the purpose of each page, this metadata must be unique for each one.
Investing in SEO has become a crucial part of any online business today. The web applications that were developed in the past were mostly static pages. The static pages pre-contain all of the information required. With the advancement of web application development, we entered an era of dynamic content rendering, where web pages’ content is stored somewhere and retrieved as needed.
This can be done in several ways:
Some systems use SSR to reduce the number of server requests and round trips for data collection and templating on the client-side. By server-side rendering, we mean that an application is capable of converting HTML files on the server into fully rendered HTML pages for the client. Web browsers send requests to the server for information, and the server instantly responds by sending a fully rendered page to the client.
SSR is unlikely to cause partial indexing or missing content. With SSR, there are fewer crawl-budget-related SEO and page speed issues than with client-side rendering. Third-party JavaScript seldom works with SSR, which is one of the biggest drawbacks.
When using client-side rendering, content is rendered by the browser and not by the site’s server. When using a JavaScript framework, this is the default rendering method.
It is the most reliable and scalable method for providing dynamic web pages for website owners since it lowers the server load. As a result, the load time can be extended from milliseconds to seconds, which causes users to wait longer than they would like. In order to render JavaScript, search bots must revisit the site when resources become available. This may require a considerable amount of time.
Dynamic rendering means sending client-side content to the user and rendering user-side content to the bots that will produce HTML pages. A benefit of this is that Google can crawl and index your content without having to run JavaScript. Another advantage is that developers save time and resources by re-rendering content for humans and bots. In addition, it resolves issues with crawl budgets related to page speed. As a result, Google can crawl more pages on the site.
With this concept, all the pages and components of an application are loaded once, and only when they are needed. Javascript makes this possible because it dynamically decides which content is required, fetches the data, and renders it in the desired format
Single-page applications have many inherent advantages as a result of their dynamic nature.
These include:
The Angular Universal framework allows us to build apps that combine the performance and user engagement advantages of single-page apps with the SEO advantages of static pages.
In addition to rendering HTML on the server, Angular Universal offers several other features. Angular Universal is similar to for example a server-side template language, such as Jade, based on the term “server-side rendering”. However, it offers even more features.
With Angular Universal, you get an initial HTML payload rendered on the server as well as booting a trimmed-down Angular version on the client. From there, Angular takes over as a single-page app, generating HTML on the client rather than the server.
In the end, you get the same result, a single-page application, but now, because you got the HTML payload from the server, it will start up much faster and also be fully SEO indexable.
Let us first create a blank Angular JS application before we begin to build an Angular SEO solution.
ng new seo-friendly-app
Using this command, we will create a brand-new Angular JS application where we’ll design a home page and blog page, render content on the blog page and make them SEO-friendly.
As a start, let’s create routes and pages related to the same. Create your home and blog pages using the following commands in the terminal.
ng g c pages/home –skipTests=true
ng g c pages/blog –skipTests=true
The components will be created and imported into the app.module.ts file. Add the pages to the routing module so that they can be routed. Modify the app-routing.module.ts file.
import { NgModule } from ‘@angular/core’;
import { Routes, RouterModule } from ‘@angular/router’;
import { HomeComponent } from ‘./pages/home/home.component’;
import { BlogComponent } from ‘./pages/blog/blog.component’;
const routes: Routes = [
{
path: ‘home’,
component: HomeComponent
},
{
path:’blog’,
component: BlogComponent
},
{
path:’**’,
component: HomeComponent
}
];
@NgModule({
imports: [RouterModule.forRoot(routes)],
exports: [RouterModule]
})
export class AppRoutingModule { }
In the above code, components are mapped to their routes, and HomeComponent is set as the default component. The next step is to modify the app.component.html file so that it contains only one line of code.
After this, run the application using the following command and confirm that it is set up correctly. After the command has been executed, you can visit localhost:4200 to ensure everything is set up correctly. It should say “home works”.
ng serve
Add a header to the page so that we can navigate through the pages. Type the following command to create a header component.
ng g c header –skipTests=true
Next, add navigation elements to the header.component.html.
The end result is a two-page application that has unstyled navigation between them. Now, let’s examine it from an SEO standpoint. Select “View page source” from the right-click menu. Search engine crawlers should be able to see how your page would look without Javascript. Below is an example.
Perform the same action on the blog page and note the content. The process is similar. This also includes the title and body of the page. The reason is that Angular modifies your DOM using javascript.
In essence, pre-rendering means compiling the HTML content of the page ahead of time. Ensure that the title and metadata of the page appear on the client-side by implementing this. Pre-rendering allows us to expose the final HTML content rather than blank HTML to the crawler.
ExpressionEngine is used to render the content on the server using the express Angular Universal rendering engine:
import {createEngine} from ‘angular2-express-engine’;
import { UniversalModule } from ‘angular2-universal’;
app.engine(‘.html’, createEngine({}));
app.set(‘views’, __dirname);
app.set(‘view engine’, ‘html’);
@NgModule({
bootstrap: [ App ],
declarations: [ App, … ],
imports: [
UniversalModule, // NodeModule, NodeHttpModule, and NodeJsonpModule are included
…
],
providers: […],
})
export class MainModule {
}
function ngApp(req, res) {
let baseUrl = ‘/’;
let url = req.originalUrl || ‘/’;
let config = {
req,
res,
requestUrl: url,
baseUrl,
ngModule: MainModule,
preboot: false,
originUrl: ROOT_URL
};
console.log(“rendering …”);
res.render(‘index’, config, (err, html) => {
res.status(200).send(html);
});
}
Thus, Angular SEO can be summed up as follows:
How do I make Angular projects SEO friendly?
Angular pages can be crawled by Google?
It is believed that Google is capable of crawling an Angular Website, as it has done in the past. It is strictly recommended to create Angular universal SEO websites; otherwise, it would be difficult to index the pages.
Is there a framework that is most effective for SEO?
Rails is one of the most effective frameworks in terms of SEO because it helps developers create SEO-friendly URLs and build responsive websites. Additionally, it enables you to implement client-side and server-side caching, including Meta tags, and even add breadcrumbs.
