Essential SEO Techniques to Optimize React Web Applications

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of raising a website’s exposure on search engines in order to increase both the quality and quantity of web traffic to that site.The primary goal of SEO is to raise a web app’s placement in search results on Google and Bing when a specific keyword is used by the target market to get information.

What is React and SPA’s?

For the development of web and mobile applications, Meta (previously Facebook) created the open-source React JavaScript package. React’s major characteristics include declaratively, component-based architecture, and simpler DOM manipulation.

An SPA (Single-page application) is a web app implementation that loads only a single web document, and then updates the body content of that single document via JavaScript APIs. As a single page application the frontend client side and backend is separate so it is an easy and efficient implementation of the modern web application.

What is SEO and its Benefits?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of making changes to a website so that it will appear higher in search results when users look for particular words and phrases.
Web spiders are tools that search engines use to determine where a website ranks in search results. A web crawler is a bot that views websites frequently and examines them in accordance with predetermined standards established by the search engine. Every search engine has a unique spider; Google’s is known as the Googlebot.

Advantages of SEO

• SEO targets quality traffic
• You don’t need to pay for ads in SEO
• SEO gets more clicks than PPC
• You can move ahead of the competition

Common SEO Issues with React

SEO for web pages built with React is absolutely essential. The software engineers and developers can handle and resolve the following SEO challenges.

1. Use of Single Page Application (SPA):

A JS-based Single Page Application has been created by developers to aid in reducing the loading time problem.(SPA). This is a significant issue with SEO for React websites and applications. They do not refresh the entire page. Instead, they update the information. As a result, since its inception, this technology has been significantly improving the performance of web pages.

2. Lack of SEO Tags:

Information is loaded dynamically by SPAs. This makes it difficult for the crawler to finish the page load cycle when it taps on a particular link. The information won’t update. This is a key factor in the crawler’s inability to display SPA, which ultimately gets indexed as an empty page format.

3. Slow and Complex Indexing Process:

As react SPAs are built with minified javascript code Google bots can easily scan and understand only HTML pages Google performs all these operations very fast. But when it comes to pages with JavaScript code, the process of indexing gets more complex.This process is linear and significantly slower than indexing an HTML page.

4. Challenges of Indexing SPA’s :

Web programmes made with React are known as single-page applications (SPAs). These online applications have a single page that loads only once. All other data is dynamically imported as required. SPAs are quick, responsive, and give users a linear experience, in contrast to conventional multi-page applications.

However, SPAs have a major SEO limitation in spite of all these advantages for end users. Such web applications can provide information even after the page has loaded. The bot will see an empty website if it is crawling the page before the content has loaded. The site won’t have much of it listed. As a consequence, your website will rank much lower in search results.

5. Errors in Javascript Code :

HTML and JavaScript have absolutely different approaches to processing errors. A single error in JavaScript code can make indexing impossible.This is because the JavaScript parser is completely intolerant of errors. If the parser meets a character in an unexpectable place, it immediately stops parsing the current script and shows a SyntaxError. Therefore, a single character or typo can lead to complete inoperability of the script. If this situation occurs when the Google bot is indexing the page, the bot will see an empty page and index it as a page without content.

Overcoming React SEO Issues and Making React App SEO Friendly

All the limitations we’ve described above can be bypassed. Here are the best practices you can use to solve React and SEO problems.

🔸Pre Rendering

One popular method for making single- and multi-page web apps SEO-friendly is pre-rendering. When search engines can’t properly render your pages, pre-rendering is used. Pre-renderers are specialized programmes that intercept requests to your website and, if the request is from a bot, send a cached static HTML version of your website in these circumstances. The typical page loads if the request came from a user.

🔸Server Side Rendering

Client-side rendering is problematic for SEO since it prevents Google bots from finding any content or only finds a small amount of content that they can’t effectively index. Browsers and Google bots receive whole HTML files when rendering is done on the server. Google bots can properly index the page and give it a higher ranking. The simplest approach to build an SEO-friendly React website is through server-side rendering. A second layer of Next.js must be added, though, if you wish to build an SPA that renders on the server.

🔸Isomorphic React Apps

Isomorphic React App is a web app that consists of code that can run on both server and client-side. It usually takes full advantage of performance and SEO friendliness from the server. And combine it with browser capabilities to handle complex user interactions.

🔸Next.js for SEO Friendliness

The pre-rendering functionality in Next.js creates the HTML that is expected to render on the server before sending it to the client. Because the search engine will get HTML immediately from the server and won’t need to generate HTML while crawling, this pre-rendering functionality improves SEO for the Next.js application.