How to Optimize Your Website SEO Using JavaScript

Most of the websites nowadays are built on JavaScript and its frameworks and almost every browser has the JavaScript engine, this is a perfect correlation to know how important it is to use JavaScript SEO to improve your website ranking and visibility to a large number of users.

This article will be helpful not just for developers but for content creators to know how to optimize their website for SEO using JavaScript, which involves various factors and best practices.

What is JavaScript SEO?

SEO is search engine optimization that is used to crawl, search, and index the content from different websites, and websites that are built on JavaScript can use JavaScript SEO to rank their website and help the search engine in its working. It is just a practice of optimizing the website and making it search engine-friendly which is dependent on JavaScript for its functionalities and content rendering.

Google and other search engines have improved their abilities to crawl and index JavaScript-based websites in server-side rendering (SSR) and client-side rendering (CSR) due to the wide acceptance of JavaScript by the developer community.

To learn more about JavaScript, refer to this article: Introduction to JavaScript

To learn more about SEO, refer to this article: Basics of SEO

How Does Google Crawl and Index JavaScript?

In starting search engine crawlers like Google were not very good at crawling or indexing, but over time with the help of automation, they have improved it exponentially. Given points below are considered by Google while it crawls and indexes JavaScript.

• Initial Fetch and Crawling: When Googlebot gets a URL for crawling its HTML content, it will send a request to the web server to fetch the data. Googlebot will easily fetch the initial HTML content if the webpage is highly dependent on JavaScript.
• Rendering- JavaScript Execution: When the previous fetching and crawling part is done, Googlebot will execute JavaScript to render the page and get the rendered DOM (Document Object Model). 
• Rendering- Content Extraction: Once the DOM is rendered, Googlebot extracts the content, links, and other information from that page. After that, it will start its process of analyzing the content for indexing.
• Indexing: Google search engine will index the extracted content. The indexed content will be used to rank the page in search results. 

This is how Google again and again checks the URLs to crawl and index the Websites.

Best Practices to Optimize the SEO in JavaScript Websites

People visit websites for different reasons, but for reading content some important factors should be considered like fast loading of content, better user experience and SEO-friendly content. If a user visits your website multiple times and shares the website link then it will automatically improve the ranking of your website. Below are some of the best practices that you should consider to optimize the SEO in JavaScript website

1. Leverage Server-Side Rendering (SSR)

Server-side rendering is used to allow your web server to first render your JavaScript-driven content before serving it to the user’s browser. This method makes sure that search engine crawlers can easily access and index content, as it comes into view in its fully rendered form. Popular JavaScript frameworks like Next.js and Nuxt.js provide built-in SSR support, making it challenging to implement. This is one of the best practices to help your website to rank up on your browser.

2. Use Progressive Enhancement

This technique is very useful to build your website’s functionality in layers. Initially, Start with a basic HTML structure followed by JavaScript enhancement gradually. Progressive enhancement makes sure that your site’s core content is accessible to search users and engineers with disabled JavaScript, and still delivers an enhancement to those with JavaScript-enabled browsers. This is the best strategy in web design that focuses on web content that allows everyone to access the basic usefulness and content of the web page.

3. Implement Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is a method that carries over the loading of unnecessary resources, such as images or videos until the user flips down the page. This method not only improves the website’s overall performance but also prevents search engineers from indexing empty or irrelevant placeholders. Use the ‘loading = “lazy”’ kind to attribute images or videos to support lazy loading in modern browsers. This method can be implemented by using the built-in function of react which is ‘React. lazy’. This is also known as code splitting.

4. Monitor Your Website's Performance

By making the proper maintenance of the system, we can enhance the overall performance of the system. In the same way, Regularly analyze the performance of your JavaScript website using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse. With the help of Lighthouse, we can reduce unnecessary scripts, and minimize the number of lines of codes to make sure that fast loading times, along with the optimization of images and videos, will help to make a positive impact on search engine optimization.

5. Mobile-First Design

A web design should be responsive, which means it should work on any type of device like mobile phones, tab and laptops. Google’s search algorithms also prioritize mobile-first design, so make sure that your JavaScript website is fully responsive and all kinds of device-friendly. We can make our website responsive with the help of Bootstrap (it is a CSS framework). Testing your website on various screen size devices and browsers to ensure a better user experience.

6. Stay Informed and Adapt

As technology is increasing over time, search engine algorithms continually change and gradually optimize. Google’s algorithms have hundreds of fields to rank web content making Search engine optimization a complex and ever-evolving field. Always updated with the latest trends of SEO, best experiences and search engine updates. Be ready to adapt and me all the necessary updates to your JavaScript-driven website to maintain or improve the overall performance which leads to the search engine optimization ranking on your browsers.

7. Enabling JavaScript Crawling

Enabling JavaScript crawling is an important technique for optimizing search engine optimization. To make our information valuable or indexable, we allow our search engine to crawl content. This will help in improving the ranking higher in search results by search engines to understand the context and relevance of your pages. For enabling JavaScript crawling, always ensure that the code of your JavaScript website should be easily readable by search engine optimizers. AJAX is a technique that is not easily interpreted by SEOs.

Conclusion

To make a website SEO-friendly, you need to work on the quality of the content and the technology of the website on which your website is hosted. As the technology is growing very rapidly, the competition along with it also arises so you need to work on the enhancement of user experience and make your website faster as well. Also, SEO is a continuously evolving process that requires attention to content quality and keyword optimization. By continuously monitoring your site's performance and staying up-to-date with the latest SEO trends, you can maintain a strong online presence.