Angular SEO: 9 Tips and 5 Tools for Your Angular Website

Navigating the world of SEO in the context of Single Page Applications is inherently difficult.

But can we streamline this process? Is it possible to ensure that the flexibility of Angular goes hand-in-hand with the critical need for effective SEO?

In this comprehensive guide, we confront these issues head-on, offering actionable insights, practical strategies, and indispensable tools to help you make your Angular app truly SEO-friendly.

If your journey in Angular development has been marked by struggles with SEO, this guide is tailored for you. Why don’t we try one more time, together?

What is Angular?

Before we move forward, let’s take a brief look at what Angular is.

Angular is a popular open-source web application framework developed by Google. It’s particularly effective for creating Single-Page Applications (SPAs), where the entire website content is loaded onto a single HTML page. This page is then updated dynamically as users interact with the application, providing a fast and seamless user experience.

However, while Angular excels in creating dynamic, engaging web applications, it also introduces certain challenges in terms of SEO performance.

SEO limitations of Angular

While working with JavaScript frameworks such as Angular, SEO can become a point of friction.

While these limitations may seem daunting, there are numerous strategies that you can use to overcome them and enhance the SEO performance of your Angular application. As we continue this exploration, we’ll provide practical, actionable guidance on how you can conquer these challenges and make your Angular applications SEO-friendly.

But first, let’s delve into the challenges associated with using Angular to understand its default limitations in terms of performance and SEO.

# JavaScript rendering: the primary challenge

The primary challenge lies in how search engine crawlers interpret JavaScript-rendered content. In traditional static websites, the server sends fully-rendered HTML to the client, making it easy for search engines to crawl and index the content. However, in the case of Angular SPAs, much of the page content is dynamically generated and rendered on the client-side via JavaScript.

While Google has improved its ability to crawl and index JavaScript content significantly over the years, the process is not as straightforward as with static HTML. Google uses a two-step process to index JavaScript websites. First, it crawls the raw HTML document (pre-rendering phase), and later, typically a few seconds to minutes, it returns to render and index the JavaScript-generated content (post-rendering phase).

However, this two-step process has some inherent limitations:

• Delay in indexing: The delay between the pre-rendering and post-rendering phases means that JavaScript-rendered content may take longer to be indexed. This delay could potentially impact your website’s visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs).
• Incomplete crawling: Not all search engines can crawl JavaScript-rendered content effectively. This means that while your Angular website might perform well on Google, it may not be fully indexed by other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, or Baidu, which have historically lagged behind in their ability to interpret JavaScript.
• Increased resource consumption: JavaScript rendering requires more computational resources, both on the part of search engines and users’ devices. This could potentially slow down the indexing process and impact page load speed, a key factor in user experience and SEO rankings.

#2 Lack of semantic HTML

Semantic HTML elements like <header>, <footer>, <article>, and <section> provide important context about your content to search engines, enhancing its crawlability and optimizing the crawl budget.

However, Angular applications often use generic <div> and <span> elements for rendering, which lack the semantic context of traditional HTML elements.

#3 Limited URL structure

In an Angular SPA, different views are typically loaded under the same URL, with changes in the view controlled by JavaScript.

While this provides a smooth user experience, it can cause problems with SEO. Search engines struggle to differentiate between these dynamically loaded views, as they are presented under the same URL. This results in a lower number of pages indexed and a potential loss of organic traffic.

9 tips on building an SEO-friendly Angular app

Optimizing your Angular application for SEO requires substantial planning followed by careful implementation. But although Angular does present some SEO challenges, with the right strategies, you can significantly improve your app’s SEO performance.

In this section, we will discuss some of the best practices you can adopt to make your Angular application SEO-friendly. It’s important to remember that SEO is not just about appeasing search engines, but also about improving the user experience. With these steps, you can ensure your Angular application shines in both aspects.

#1 Server-Side Rendering with Angular Universal

Angular Universal is a technology that allows Angular applications to be rendered on the server. This means that your application can generate static HTML pages on the server, which can be sent to the client instead of the raw JavaScript files. This way, search engine crawlers receive a fully rendered page, just as they would with a traditional website.

To implement Angular Universal:

• First, install the necessary packages by running ng add @nguniversal/express-engine –clientProject <yourProjectName>, replacing <yourProjectName> with the name of your Angular project.
• Modify your application to support server-side rendering (SSR). This will likely involve updating your app to account for differences in the server environment, such as a lack of direct access to DOM APIs.
• Once your application supports SSR, run npm run build:ssr && npm run server:ssr to build and serve your application with server-side rendering.

Remember, while SSR greatly improves SEO, it may increase server load, so consider using caching strategies to mitigate this issue.

(Optional) Using pre-rendering techniques

For smaller applications or pages that don’t update content frequently, pre-rendering is a viable alternative to server-side rendering. Pre-rendering generates static HTML pages at build time for each of your application’s routes, making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site.

You can use tools like Angular Pre-render to create pre-rendered pages for your Angular application. Angular Pre-render crawls all routes in your application and saves each as a static HTML file.

#2 Setting titles and metadata

The HTML <title> and <meta> tags play a crucial role in SEO, providing search engines with information about your page’s content. To manage these elements dynamically in an Angular app, use the Title and Meta services provided by the @angular/platform-browser package.

Here’s an example of how you can use these services:

import { Title, Meta } from '@angular/platform-browser';

constructor(private titleService: Title, private metaService: Meta) {}

setSEOData(title: string, description: string) {
this.titleService.setTitle(title);
this.metaService.updateTag({ name: 'description', content: description });
}

You can call the setSEOData method from your component with the desired title and meta description whenever a new view is loaded.

#3 Lazy loading and image optimization

Lazy loading can significantly improve the load time and performance of your Angular app, which in turn, positively impacts SEO. It allows you to defer loading non-critical or below-the-fold content until it’s needed.

In the context of images, you can use the NgOptimizedImage directive for implementing lazy loading and other optimization techniques. Although it is not a built-in Angular directive, it can be easily integrated.

<img ngOptimizedImage [src]="imagePath" alt="Alt text for image">

This directive handles tasks like lazy loading, generating and injecting responsive images, and implementing modern image formats like WebP.

#4 Using structured data (schema) markup

Structured data markup, also known as schema markup, helps search engines better understand your content. This can improve your visibility on SERPs and potentially enable rich snippets for your pages.

You can add structured data to your Angular application by injecting it into the HTML head using the Meta service:

this.metaService.addTag({ name: 'json+ld', content: JSON.stringify(yourStructuredDataObject) });

Remember to replace yourStructuredDataObject with a JavaScript object that follows the structured data guidelines provided by Google.

#5 Skipping JS hydration for particular components

The ngSkipHydration attribute allows you to mark certain parts of your Angular application to be excluded from client-side rehydration.

This can be useful for static components that don’t require any dynamic updates or user interactions. By skipping the rehydration process for these components, you can reduce the client-side JavaScript footprint and improve page load performance.

Here’s how to use it:

<div ngSkipHydration>
<!-- Your static content goes here -->
</div>

Remember, any interactions or Angular bindings within this tag won’t work, so use it carefully and only on truly static content.

#6 Implementing proper routing

In an Angular SPA, different views are loaded dynamically under the same URL, which can be a challenge for SEO.

Angular’s router module allows you to associate different views with unique URLs, thus making your content more discoverable and indexable by search engines.

For example:

const routes: Routes = [
{ path: 'page1', component: Page1Component },
{ path: 'page2', component: Page2Component }
];

@NgModule({
imports: [RouterModule.forRoot(routes)],
exports: [RouterModule]
})
export class AppRoutingModule { }

This code creates two separate URLs (/page1 and /page2) for Page1Component and Page2Component respectively.

#7 Avoiding hash-based URLs

By default, Angular uses hash-based URLs (e.g., www.example.com/#/page1) to support routing. However, search engines often ignore the part of the URL after the hash, making hash-based URLs less SEO-friendly.

You can switch to HTML5 pushState style URLs by setting the useHash configuration option to false in your routing module:

@NgModule({
imports: [RouterModule.forRoot(routes, { useHash: false })],
exports: [RouterModule]
})
export class AppRoutingModule { }

#8 Enabling canonical URLs

Duplicate content can harm your SEO rankings, and it’s especially important for Angular apps as multiple URLs can display the same content.

Canonical URLs help search engines understand which version of a page they should index and display in search results.

You can use Angular’s Meta service to add a canonical URL to your page:

import { Meta } from '@angular/platform-browser';

constructor(private metaService: Meta) {}

setCanonicalURL(url: string) {
let link: HTMLLinkElement = this.metaService.getTag('rel="canonical"');
if (!link) {
link = this.metaService.create('link');
this.metaService.addTag({ rel: 'canonical', href: url });
} else {
this.metaService.updateTag({ rel: 'canonical', href: url });
}
}

You can call the setCanonicalURL method from your component with the desired canonical URL whenever a new view is loaded.

#9 Leveraging service workers

Service workers are an excellent way to improve the performance and user experience of your Angular applications, which indirectly benefits your SEO. They are a type of web worker, running separately from the main browser thread, and enabling functionality like caching, push notifications, and background syncs.

Here’s why they can be a valuable addition to your Angular app:

• Offline capabilities: Service workers can cache your application’s resources, making your application available offline or in poor network conditions. This ensures a smooth user experience, which is a key factor considered by search engines.
• Fast load times: By serving cached content, service workers can drastically reduce load times, contributing to improved page speed – a significant factor in SEO rankings.
• Background updates: Service workers can update the cached resources in the background, ensuring that users always get the latest version of your application.

Angular provides a service worker library called @angular/service-worker. Here’s a basic implementation:

• Start by adding the service worker package to your project using the Angular CLI:

ng add @angular/pwa

• Import the ServiceWorkerModule in your AppModule:

import { ServiceWorkerModule } from '@angular/service-worker';
import { environment } from '../environments/environment';

@NgModule({
declarations: [
AppComponent
],
imports: [
BrowserModule,
ServiceWorkerModule.register('ngsw-worker.js', { enabled: environment.production })
],
providers: [],
bootstrap: [AppComponent]
})
export class AppModule { }

• Configure your service worker in the ngsw-config.json file. Here you can specify which files and routes to cache.

Remember, service workers only run over HTTPS due to security reasons, except on localhost for development.

# Service workers and Angular Universal

Service workers and Angular Universal are complementary and can be used together for optimizing Angular apps:

• Angular Universal handles server-side rendering, which ensures that crawlers receive a fully-rendered HTML page, improving your SEO. However, it doesn’t provide offline capabilities or caching for fast load times on return visits.
• On the other hand, service workers provide robust caching mechanisms and enable offline functionality, enhancing your app’s performance and user experience.

So, while Angular Universal helps get your application indexed correctly by search engines, service workers can further improve your SEO by boosting page load speed and providing a seamless user experience even in offline conditions.

5 tools for Angular SEO

To successfully optimize your Angular application for SEO, you’ll need a set of tools that can help automate and streamline various tasks.

In this section, we’ll dive into some of the most powerful tools that you can leverage for your Angular SEO strategy.

#1 Angular Universal for Server-Side Rendering

As we’ve discussed earlier, Angular Universal is a crucial tool for enhancing SEO in Angular applications. It allows Angular apps to be pre-rendered on the server, resulting in static HTML pages that are easily crawlable by search engine bots.

Angular Universal not only ensures better indexing by search engines but also leads to improved performance and faster first-contentful-paint times. It’s a key solution to overcome the SEO limitations inherent in client-side rendered JavaScript applications.

#2 Ngx-seo

Ngx-seo is a handy library designed to help you manage metadata in your Angular application. It provides an easy-to-use API for updating the metadata of your pages dynamically, which is particularly useful for single-page applications.

The library can handle standard metadata, Open Graph metadata, and Twitter Card metadata, all of which are important for effective SEO.

To use Ngx-seo, you’ll need to install it via npm, import the module, and then use its services to update your page metadata as needed.

#3 Scully

Scully is a static site generator for Angular, often dubbed the “Jamstack solution for Angular”.

It takes your application and generates a static site that can be served easily, providing the SEO benefits of server-rendered apps while maintaining the development advantages of SPAs.

The pre-rendered pages generated by Scully are easy for search engine bots to crawl and index, ensuring good visibility on search engine result pages. Plus, Scully comes with plugins for lazy-loading images, creating an XML sitemap, and more, all of which further contribute to your SEO efforts.

#4 NgOptimizedImage

NgOptimizedImage is a custom directive for image optimization in Angular.

This directive allows you to implement several image optimization techniques such as lazy loading, responsive images, and modern image formats like WebP, which can drastically improve your application’s performance.

As page speed is a significant ranking factor for SEO, optimizing your images with NgOptimizedImage can contribute significantly to your Angular app’s SEO.

#5 Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO, a well-regarded tool for optimizing websites for search engines, can be adapted for use in Angular applications.

Though it is not directly designed for Angular, developers have found ways to effectively incorporate it into their Angular projects.

The Yoast SEO library can be incorporated into an Angular application by creating a web worker. The documentation for Yoast SEO suggests the following code for creating a web worker:

import { AnalysisWebWorker } from "yoastseo";

const worker = new AnalysisWebWorker( self );
worker.register();

However, this code directly imports a Node.js module, which presents a challenge when using Yoast SEO in an Angular application, as Angular’s web workers do not support importing Node modules in this manner.

To overcome this challenge, you can create a workaround by building the Yoast SEO source code into a webpack bundle. This bundle, along with a Babel polyfill, can then be imported into your web worker code using importScripts. After this setup, a web worker can be created using AnalysisWebWorker as outlined in Yoast’s documentation.

Once the web worker is set up, you can import Yoast SEO as normal in your Angular service for Yoast and connect it to your web worker.

Here is an example of how this can be done:

self.importScripts('./babel-polyfill.min.js');
self.importScripts('./yoast-bundle.js');

// Create worker for Yoast
const yoast = self.YoastSeo.yoastSeo;
const worker = new yoast.AnalysisWebWorker( self );
worker.register();

And in your Angular service for Yoast:

import { AnalysisWorkerWrapper, createWorker, Paper } from "yoastseo";

export class YoastSeoService {
url = '/path-to-worker/yoast-worker.js';
worker = new AnalysisWorkerWrapper( createWorker( this.url ) );
constructor() {}

assess(text, keyword, title) {
this.worker.initialize( {
locale: "en_US",
contentAnalysisActive: true,
keywordAnalysisActive: true,
logLevel: "ERROR",
}).then( () => {
// The worker has been configured, we can now analyze a Paper.
let paper = new Paper(text, {
keyword: keyword,
title: title,
url: `https://site-url/(${title.toLowerCase().replace(/[^a-zA-Z0-9]+/g, '-')})`,
description: text.replace(/<[^>]+>/gm, '-').slice(0, 140)
});

return this.worker.analyze( paper );
}).then( ( results ) => {
console.log( 'Analysis results:' );
console.log( results );
return results;
}).catch( ( error ) => {
console.error( 'An error occured while analyzing the text:' );
console.error( error );
});
}
}

This process allows the Yoast SEO functionality to work as expected, without causing the page to freeze.

The Yoast SEO source code can be bundled in a specific way to make it compatible with Angular applications. You can copy the source code for the yoastseo package to a local folder, run npm install, and then use webpack to create a bundle. The bundled Yoast will be in a new folder named dist.

Conclusion

As we conclude this guide, we’ve tackled the inherent SEO limitations of Angular, learned how to build an SEO-friendly Angular application, and explored valuable tools that can help you streamline your SEO efforts.

While we’ve covered considerable ground, it’s important to remember that both SEO and Angular are ever-evolving landscapes, requiring continuous learning and adaptation.

The techniques and tools discussed here are foundational. They provide a solid base for your Angular SEO efforts. As you progress, keep an open mind for new approaches and solutions that can further optimize your application’s visibility to search engines.

That said, this guide has prepared you for making your Angular applications SEO-friendly. Now, persist in experimenting, learning, and optimizing.

Here’s to your success in navigating Angular SEO.

If you’ve come this far in your Angular SEO journey, yet still find yourself facing challenges in optimizing your application, remember, you don’t have to navigate this path alone. Let’s work together to make your Angular application not only user-friendly but also search-engine-optimized.

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