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251 viewsOptimizing web page content for better SEO has become a standard practice for any digital marketing business.
But if a web page only offers content, it becomes boring.
Every website owner tries to make their web pages exciting and interactive to offer a satisfying user experience.
And most of them depend on JavaScript (JS) for this purpose.
Google suggests learning JS as the plain HTML era has gone.
And this learning is essential as, if not implemented correctly, JS can ruin your SEO.
Go through this article till the end to avoid such scenarios.
What is JavaScript SEO?
JavaScript SEO is a part of technical SEO that ensures websites built with JavaScript are easily searchable, crawlable, and indexable by Googlebots.
The main goal of JS SEO is to make these websites visible and rank higher in SERPs.
How Does Google Process JavaScripts?
As Google’s John Muller stated, the web has moved from plain HTML. Currently, a downloaded HTML response is not enough anymore to see a web page’s content.
After implementing JavaScript, search engines need to render many pages to view the content as the user sees it.
There are three phases of processing JavaScript by Google,
Crawling
- The Googlebot first queues the list of URLs of the web pages.
- Next, it crawls all the URLs in the queue.
- Then, the Google crawler sends a GET request to the server.
- The server processes the request and returns the content as an HTML document.
Rendering
- After receiving the HTML from the server, Googlebot queues the resources to be rendered, excluding the JS and CSS files.
- The Renderer then renders the queued resources first.
- Once done, a headless Chromium, which is basically a Chrome browser without any user interface, renders the JavaScript.
Indexing
- Google indexes the page by using the final rendered HTML document.
How To Avoid Common JS SEO Issues?
Following are the ways to avoid the most common JavaScript SEO issues faced by website owners,
Blocking .js Files
Often, website owners accidentally block the crawling of .js files by Google crawlers by implementing robots.txt files.
That also prevents Googlebot from rendering and indexing those .js files.
Make sure you allow JavaScripts to be crawled by the crawlers by adding the following code.
Time-out Error
Google does not allow much time for rendering JavaScript content.
Hence, the page may not be indexed due to a time-out error.
Improper Usage of Internal Links
If you have a JavaScript-heavy website, you must use proper internal linking to guide Google crawlers to discover and crawl your web pages.
Internal linking plays an essential role in JS SEO.
RankWatch backlink checker free online tool is the best for checking your internal linking profile.
Just follow the simple steps to execute a backlink analysis of your website,
- Log in to your RankWatch account and visit the dashboard.
- Click on ‘Backlink Analyzer’ and enter the domain name of your website.
- Click on the ‘Search’ Button.
- The tool will provide you with the summary report in no time. It includes the total number of active and deleted backlinks, citation score, trust score, and a date-wise link acquisition trend graph. You need to follow up and resolve the issues behind deleted backlinks.
Incorrect Implementation of Lazy Loading
You must ensure the correct implementation of lazy loading using JavaScript.
Do not implement lazy loading on content that needs to be indexed.
It would be best if you focused on implementing lazy loading on iframes and images to ensure a higher LCP score.
Incorrect Format of URLs
Google bypasses hashes (#).
Hence, you must ensure that your web pages use static URLs instead of dynamic URLs containing special characters like #,%,+, etc.
How To Optimize JS Content For SEO?
Followings are a few best practices for optimizing your JS content for SEO,
Use GSC To Confirm The Rendering
Launching a website itself is a hectic task. But if Google does not render your website after its launch, all your efforts will go in vain.
Hence, you must identify whether Google renders your website using the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console. (95)
Just follow the simple steps mentioned below,
- First, you must enter your web page’s URL in the box at the top of the URL inspection tool and press the ‘enter’ key.
- Next, click on the ‘TEST LIVE URL’ icon as shown below.
- The tool will provide you with a ‘LIVE TEST’ tab in a while.
- You need to click on the ‘VIEW TESTED PAGE’ icon.
- The tool will provide you with your web page’s HTML code and screenshot.
The ‘MORE INFO’ tab provides you with information about missing content and other issues.
Ensure Indexing of JS Content
After ensuring Google is rendering your web pages, you must ensure Google is indexing your web pages containing JS content.
You can check that using the ‘site:’ command in the Google search engine, as shown below.
You will get the following result if Google has indexed your web page.
Remove Duplicate JS Files
Rendering JavaScript demands a lot of resources, and hence, Google defers the process.
Moreover, if your web page has duplicate JS files, then your page will load slowly, increasing the first input delay.
That, in turn, will boost your bounce rate.
You need to identify the usage of JS codes using a reliable tool like RankWatch website SEO analysis tool.
Once identified, you can reduce JS execution by deferring JavaScripts not in use and deleting duplicate JavaScripts.
Conclusion
You can only make your web pages interactive and user-friendly by using JavaScript. JS codes are the best to handle the application part of your web pages, if not the whole.
Hence, JS SEO has become even more critical in today’s scenario.
You must optimize for JS SEO by ensuring that your web pages containing JavaScripts are rendered and indexed by Google.
Further, you must ensure that your robots.txt files are not accidentally blocking your .js files from getting crawled, you have solid internal linking, lazy loading of web pages is correctly implemented, and your web pages have the correct URL formats to avoid JS SEO issues.
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