AngularJS is one of those JavaScript frameworks that, despite being around for a while, still has a special place in many developers’ toolkits. But as fantastic as AngularJS is for building dynamic web apps, it can throw a serious curveball when it comes to SEO.
Search engines often struggle to crawl and index websites built with heavy JavaScript frameworks like AngularJS. This means your beautifully designed website might not get the visibility it deserves on search engine results pages (SERPs), which is a big deal if you’re trying to attract organic traffic.
In this AngularJS SEO blog, we’ll explore what makes AngularJS so popular among developers, its pros and cons, and actionable strategies for making your AngularJS website more SEO-friendly. We’ll also compare AngularJS with frameworks like VueJS and ReactJS for a well-rounded perspective.
What is AngularJS?
AngularJS is an open-source JavaScript framework created by Google in 2010. It was designed to make developers’ lives easier by streamlining the building of single-page applications (SPAs). It does this by extending HTML with new attributes and expressions, allowing you to create dynamic, interactive web apps with less code and more functionality.
AngularJs uses the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern, which separates the application into three interconnected components:
- The Model: application logic and data
- The View: presentation layer that displays data and handles user interactions
- The Controller: processes user input, interacts with the model, and updates the view accordingly
This separation promotes cleaner, more organized code and facilitates easier maintenance and scalability. AngularJS also offers features like two-way data binding, directives, dependency injection, and community support, making it a popular choice for developers who want to simplify complex tasks and accelerate development.
However, while AngularJS excels at creating rich internet applications, it poses some SEO challenges. So before we discuss some techniques to make Angular SEO friendly, you need to understand AngularJS’s impact on SEO health.
Effects of AngularJS on SEO Performance
There’s no denying that AngularJS is great, but its unique challenges to JS SEO performance require careful consideration. Let’s discuss these challenges below.
1. Slow Page Load Times
Slow page load times can be a headache for SEO in AngularJS applications. AngularJS uses client-side rendering (CSR) with JavaScript, which means users’ browsers must download and run large JavaScript files before they see anything on the screen.
Related: discover the difference between CSR, SSR, and pre-rendering.
This process can lead to longer initial load times compared to websites that are rendered on the server.
Lighthouse report for an Angular website.
Since page speed is a known ranking factor in Google’s algorithm, slower load times can hurt your SEO performance by increasing bounce rates and decreasing user engagement. People are statistically less likely to wait for a slow page to load, especially on mobile devices with slower network speeds.
2. Inconsistent Crawling
Search engines traditionally have issues crawling JavaScript-heavy sites, and even though search engines like Google have gotten better at crawling JavaScript, it’s still a mixed bag. One day, your page might show up in search results just fine, and the next day, it’s like it vanished into thin air. This unpredictability makes it tough for Angular websites to rely solely on client-side rendering when you’re aiming for good SEO.
3. Meta Tags and Social Sharing Issues
When you’re working with dynamic content in AngularJS, setting up meta tags and Open Graph tags can feel like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. These meta tags are crucial—they tell search engines what your page is about and control how your content appears when shared on social media platforms.
But here’s the snag: because AngularJS generates content on the fly in the user’s browser, these meta tags often aren’t included in the initial HTML that search engine crawlers and social media bots see. This means your carefully crafted titles, descriptions, and images might not make it to the search engine results or show up correctly when someone shares your link on Facebook or Twitter.
It’s like sending out invitations to a party but forgetting to include the date and time—no one knows when to show up! This can seriously impact your SEO and diminish the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts.
If you want to improve your meta tags for better indexing and Open Graph tags for optimized social sharing, these two SEO guides can help:
- 5 Key Meta Tags That Impact Your Visibility in Search and How To Optimize Them
- How to Optimize Open Graph Tags for Social Sharing
4. Resource Allocation and Crawl Budget Issues
Search engines like Google allocate a crawl budget to each website, which is the number of pages or data they will crawl on your site within a specific timeframe. When your website relies heavily on complex JavaScript execution—as is the case with AngularJS applications—it can consume this crawl budget inefficiently.
Search engine bots may spend a lot of time processing JavaScript and rendering pages, which means they might not crawl all the sections of your site. In some cases, essential pages could be left unindexed because the crawler didn’t have enough resources.
Inefficient use of your crawl budget can hamper your site’s visibility on search engines and negatively impact your overall SEO performance.
How to Make AngularJS SEO Friendly
Alright, so how do we fix these SEO issues? Here are some strategies to get your AngularJS site in Google’s good graces.
1. Use Prerender.io
The smartest way to fix SEO issues in the Angular JavaScript framework is by implementing pre-rendering with a tool like Prerender.io. Essentially, pre-rendering generates static HTML versions of your JS dynamic pages, which search engine bots can easily crawl and index.
Prerender.io‘s dynamic rendering also detects whether a visitor is a bot or a human user. When a bot requests a page, Prerender.io serves up the prerendered static HTML version, complete with all the content and meta tags, ensuring effective indexing. Regular users, on the other hand, get the full, dynamic AngularJS experience.
This approach effectively bridges the gap between providing a rich user interface and meeting search engine requirements. It also ensures that your content appears correctly when shared on social media platforms.
This comparison page will show you how Prerender.io compares to SSR, static rendering, and hydration.
2. Optimize For Speed
Optimizing for speed is crucial for providing a good user experience and for boosting your SEO performance. To improve speed, consider implementing lazy loading to load components only when needed and reduce initial load times. You can also minify your code by compressing JavaScript and CSS files using tools like UglifyJS and CleanCSS, which decreases file sizes and speeds up downloads.
Implementing caching with Prerender can also drastically boost the page speed of your Angular website. Angular websites that use Prerender have an average page load speed of 0.05 seconds, which is massive compared to the 5.2 seconds Javascript-heavy websites usually take.
3. Set Up Meta Tags Properly
Properly setting up meta tags is crucial in making your AngularJS website more SEO-friendly. Meta titles and descriptions help search engines understand what each page on your site is about, which improves your visibility in search results and also affects how your content appears when shared on social media platforms. Because AngularJS applications often generate content dynamically, managing these meta tags can be tricky.
Thankfully, you can use AngularJS modules like angular-meta to help with this. To use it, you first have to install angular-meta and then add the ngMeta to your angular app module.
| var app = angular.module(‘myApp’, [‘ngRoute’, ‘ngMeta’]); app.config([‘ngMetaProvider’, function(ngMetaProvider) { ngMetaProvider.useTitleSuffix(true); ngMetaProvider.setDefaultTitle(‘Default Title’); ngMetaProvider.setDefaultTitleSuffix(‘ | My AngularJS App’); ngMetaProvider.setDefaultTag(‘description’, ‘This is the default description.’); }]); app.run([‘ngMeta’, function(ngMeta) { ngMeta.init(); }]); |
This module allows you to set meta tags dynamically for each view in your application, ensuring that search engines and social media platforms get the correct information.
4. Use SSR
Server-side rendering (SSR) is also a powerful way to make your AngularJS website more SEO-friendly. By rendering your pages on the server rather than the browser, you ensure that search engine bots can see the full content of your pages immediately, which improves indexing and search rankings.
While Angular Universal is a tool that enables SSR by allowing you to run Angular on the server, it’s designed for Angular versions two and above, not for AngularJS. To implement SSR with AngularJS, you might need to use alternative methods, such as headless browsers like PhantomJS.
Pro tip: see how Prerender.io is stacked up against in-house SSR based on financial and technical benefits.
5. Test and Monitor
Even after you’ve implemented all those SEO optimizations into your AngularJS website, you need to keep testing and monitoring its performance. SEO isn’t a “set it and forget it” kind of thing—it’s more like a plant that needs regular watering to stay healthy and visible in search engines.
Use tools like Google Search Console to track your site’s performance, identify crawling issues, submit your sitemap, and ensure mobile usability. Also, give Google’s PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse a spin for a deeper analysis of your site’s performance. By consistently testing, setting up alerts, and staying up-to-date with SEO best practices, you can identify and resolve issues quickly.
Now that we’ve covered how to make AngularJS SEO-friendly, let’s talk about the pros and cons of AngularJS.
Pros and Cons of AngularJS
Advantages of AngularJS
Despite some of the SEO challenges we’ve discussed, AngularJS remains a popular Javascript framework among developers for several reasons:
- Declarative Programming: focuses on the “what” instead of the “how,” making code more readable and easier to collaborate on.
- SPA-Friendly: excels at building single-page applications (SPAs) for fast, responsive user experiences like desktop apps in a browser.
- Directives and Reusable Components: allows the creation of custom directives for encapsulating complex logic, promoting clean HTML and consistency across applications.
- Two-Way Data Binding: automatically synchronizes changes between the model and view, reducing boilerplate code and speeding up development.
- Community and Support: backed by Google, with a large community offering tutorials, resources, and libraries for solving complex issues.
Disadvantages of AngularJS
While AngularJS offers numerous benefits, you need to know about its drawbacks to make an informed decision:
- Performance Issues: two-way data binding can create bottlenecks in large applications, slowing down performance as the number of watchers increases.
- Complexity: Managing large applications becomes cumbersome due to the complexity of scopes and controllers, making maintenance and scaling more challenging.
- Steep Learning Curve: concepts like directives and dependency injection can overwhelm beginners, initially slowing down development and requiring more training.
- Outdated Framework: AngularJS is considered older, with Google focusing on Angular (versions 2+), leading to fewer updates and declining community support, which may cause compatibility issues.
How Does AngularJS Compare to ReactJS and VueJS?
Now that you know AngularJS’s pros and cons, let’s compare it to its main competitors, ReactJS and VueJS.
Learning Curve
AngularJS: the truth is that AngularJS can be a beast to learn. It introduces many concepts, such as dependency injection, directives, and a custom syntax that extends HTML, which can feel overwhelming if you’re just starting out.
VueJS: on the other hand, VueJS is often praised for its simplicity and ease of use. It’s great for beginners because it allows you to gradually adopt its features without immediately diving into complex concepts.
ReactJS: React is somewhere in the middle. You’ll need to get comfortable with JSX, which lets you write HTML elements in JavaScript, but once you do, it’s fairly straightforward.
Performance
AngularJS: when it comes to performance, AngularJS can struggle, especially in larger applications. Its two-way data binding means the framework has to keep track of many things, which can slow it down as your app scales.
VueJS: this framework shines here with its virtual DOM implementation, making it fast and efficient even when handling complex updates.
ReactJS: it also uses a virtual DOM and has an efficient diffing algorithm, so it performs really well, particularly in apps that require frequent UI updates.
Scalability
React and Angular: these frameworks are generally preferred for enterprise-level applications due to their scalability, maturity, and strong community support.
Vue: while it is also capable of scaling technically, its smaller community and language barriers can impact its scalability in terms of available resources and support.
Mobile Friendliness
ReactJS: stands out with React Native, a powerful tool that allows you to build native mobile apps for iOS and Android using React.
AngularJS: doesn’t offer built-in solutions for mobile app development, so you’d need to rely on additional frameworks like Ionic to bridge the gap, which can add complexity.
VueJS: doesn’t have native mobile development capabilities out of the box either, but you can use frameworks like NativeScript or Weex to build mobile applications with Vue.
Make AngularJS and SEO Work Together
Optimizing your AngularJS website for SEO ensures your content gets visibility and helps you increase web page efficiency.
When you combine AngularJs’ strengths with smart SEO practices, you can create a website that’s functional, engaging, and highly visible to search engines. AngularJS and SEO can work together—you just need the right approach to make it happen.
Try Prerender.io to make your AngularJS website more SEO-friendly without sacrificing its dynamic capabilities. Sign up today and get 1,000 FREE monthly render credits!
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