Whether you like it or not, SEO is a crucial part of an app or website. SEO practices optimize the website for search engines to improve its ranking, bring quality and increased traffic and enhance the visibility of the site. Apps and sites which cannot be indexed easily by search engines or those optimized poorly end up being hidden behind pages of search results.
This can result in dropped visibility and decreased traffic and sales, a disaster that no business would like to go through. When working with modern JavaScript frameworks, developers should know what they are doing as bad JS handling can result in adverse effects on the SEO and visibility of the website.
SEO is one of the main challenges faced by single page applications developed using JS frameworks like Vue. In this guide, we take a look at these challenges in detail and show how easy it is to make your Vue JS app SEO-friendly.
Vue JS SEO – A Complete Guide
Any business willing to survive in this competitive world should consider the best techniques to get their site listed on the first page of Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines. You need not be an SEO expert to position your site better but you certainly need some good practices to achieve this. Below are some tips to improve your Vue JS site’s SEO.
Friendly URL
Web addresses locate the pages on the internet and tell the users what the page is about. A friendly, well-defined URL will tell the user what he can find on the page. It also improves the user experience and improves understanding of the search engines. Using keywords in URLs is a good way to improve the site’s SEO.
Viewport
This parameter is important to improve the mobile user experience by controlling the scaling and size of the page. It lets you specify how the preview pane behaves.
Page Title
One of the most notorious things about SERPs, titles are highly visible and important for the user. Your page should have a small yet concise title which is attractive and relevant enough for the user to choose the page over others.
Meta Description
Meta Description tags are quite important as they let you provide an attractive summary of your page. They let you show search engines what your content is about. These text snippets help increase the website traffic and increase the click-through rates.
Social Tags
These tags can also have a significant impact on SEO of Vue JS pages as they help spread the content on social platforms to increase your social signals. There are specific tags for different platforms.
Canonical Tag
It is quite common, particularly for SPAs, that the URL entered by a user and the URL representing the page on the server might be different. In that case, it is advisable to provide a canonical tag in the head to instruct search engines which URL they should consider as the intended URL for a specific page. Canonical tags avoid problems of duplicate content causing SEO issues that can affect your ranking.
Sitemap
Though not so important for small sites, sitemaps are useful to tell search engines which pages are specifically relevant and important on the site. A sitemap can be created manually or automatically using tools and added to the search engines to help them know the routes of your application.
Mobile Optimization
Google, if not others, prefers websites optimized for mobile use. With more and more users switching to small screens for web experience, mobile optimization is critical. Page speed is another important factor for SEO these days as search engines now prefer faster loading sites with better content. Using HTTPs also improves ranking and traffic.
Is Vue JS SEO Friendly?
Different people have different opinions on the search engine crawling of Vue.js content. Due to such confusions, the questions like ‘Is Vue JS SEO-Friendly?’ often come up regularly on forums and groups. A single page application adds dynamic content to pages so that the loading times are faster and user experience is improved.
While this architecture brings benefits to human viewers, search engine crawlers may find it difficult rendering the JS and crawling correctly. Googlebots are claimed to have been capable of rendering JS and indexing pages developed using JS frameworks but Google is not the only search engine and others may not still crawl JS and access the actual content of the page.
It is important to find out whether crawlers can run JavaScript as this determines whether or not the Vue JS site’s content is indexed by the search engine and how well it is ranked. Although some updates and announcements suggest that Googlebot attempts to render JavaScript before crawling, there is no guarantee that it will be indexed. Moreover, being indexed by a search engine is not enough; we want to rank well too.
Thus, it is essential that if you use Vue.js architecture, you should use either pre-rendered or server-rendered pages to make sure your SPA is SEO-Friendly.
SPA SEO – Single Page Applications SEO Optimization
A Single Page Application has some potential challenges associated with SEO since there is only one page which is rendered using JavaScript when loaded. As the content is not structured when requested, search engine crawlers do automatic scans but don’t find the same content that the users see in a browser.
To improve the SEO of SPAs, you should use some solutions designed to overcome these challenges.
Server-Side Rendering
As the name implies, the rendering is performed on the server and when the crawlers request, the HTML is returned to the client and is ready to serve the search bots. Server-Side Rendering is a great option for time-sensitive apps as it guarantees that your SPA is crawler-friendly because the page content is always accessible whether or not it runs JS. However, SSR comes with a cost. You need a robust infrastructure to handle the load added on the server, demanding more development time.
Prerendering
If you are not able to use SSR, there is another effective way – Prerendering and it works well for a small SPA with only a few pages. With this method, there is no need to attach the SPA on any server and rendering is done on the client side using third-party plugins like Prerender.io. It is generally implemented with a headless browser such as Chrome. Prerendering also has its own drawbacks such as challenges for pages displaying changing data, the need to prerender each route in the app and its incompatibility with pages with user-specific content.
We hope this guide on SEO Optimization of Vue JS apps and sites help you use the framework for modern app development while overcoming the SEO problems. Do share your thoughts and experiences in the comments section below.