Roughly 70% of companies plan to increase their organic marketing budgets over the next year. Much of that money will get spent on search engine optimization.
Companies know that to get more clients, they need to reach people when they’re searching for information. SEO marketing allows companies to do that.
There’s a lot that goes into SEO beyond keywords. JavaScript SEO is a growing area of SEO marketing to ensure that sites can get found in search engines.
Whether you’re a blogger who wants to reach foodies or you have an ecommerce store, you’d benefit from learning about JavaScript SEO.
We’ve got great news for you because you’re in the perfect place to learn all about JavaScript SEO basics. Keep reading to learn what it is and what you need to do to optimize your JavaScript site for success.
What Is JavaScript SEO?
There are different types of SEO, such as on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO, and content SEO.
On-Page SEO looks at the SEO ranking factors on your site, such as keywords, headings, and metadata. Off-page SEO refers to ranking factors such as social media activity and backlinks.
Content SEO overlaps with on-page SEO because it focuses on keywords. It also encompasses the quality of your content.
Technical SEO ensures that Google’s bots can read and index your site. Without it, your site won’t appear in the search engine let alone rank highly in search results.
JavaScript SEO is part of the technical side of SEO. It’s one of the types of marketing that’s highly specialized within search engine optimization.
Millions of websites use WordPress as the content management system. WordPress relies on four programming languages: PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Google’s search bots were created way back in the late 1990s. At that time, they were built to crawl and index HTML, since that was the main programming language at the time.
As websites became more complex, Googlebot adapted by learning to crawl and index other programming languages, but HTML is the main language to crawl websites
Googlebot can read and index other programming languages, but not very well.
Now that WordPress is so dominant, it’s more important than ever to make sure Google can read, render, and index your website.
That’s what JavaScript SEO is all about.
JavaScript SEO Basics
Do you need to learn all about JavaScript? Fortunately, no. You do need to understand how Google handles JavaScript.
Googlebot crawls your site and reads the HTML first. The JavaScript gets sent to the rendering queue. The bot can’t determine from the code how users find information and how user-friendly your site is, so it has to render the site just like a web browser.
Fortunately, most pages don’t sit in the rendering queue. They get rendered in a few minutes, not a few days.
Once the page gets rendered, then it gets sent for indexing.
Mastering JavaScript SEO
Mastering the basics of SEO isn’t difficult. A lot of the work overlaps with other types of SEO. You can start by working with on-page SEO.
The same rules still apply. Make sure that each page has meta descriptions, title tags, and alt-attributes. Be sure to have alt-text for all of your images and keep your titles and descriptions original.
Don’t repeat the descriptions or title tags for any pages. It’s a common error that webmasters make because they think it doesn’t matter.
It does because you’re suddenly competing against yourself in Google’s index. Google won’t know how to classify which page is more important, so it won’t show either one of them at the top of search results.
The next thing to do is to make sure you give Googlebot permission to crawl and index your site. It’s simple by inserting this code into your robots.txt file:
“Useragent: Googlebot
Allow: .js
Allow .css”
That ensures Googlebot has access to all of the resources required to render and index your site.
HTML and JavaScript
Googlebot is much better at reading and interpreting HTML than JavaScript. That’s why you want the most important information to Googlebot to be in HTML.
Go through your site’s code and make sure that all link references start with <a href= because that makes it easy for Googlebot to index internal and external links.
All meta descriptions, alt-text, heading tags, and title tags must be in HTML. The content itself can be in JavaScript.
Check Your Sitemap and URLs
Googlebot uses your sitemap to determine how your site is structured. The sitemap organizes pages, posts, tags, and categories in one XML file.
Your job is to make sure the site’s structure is clear and simple. Each page should have a clean URL, meaning there shouldn’t be hashtags or anything that breaks up the URL text.
Each page should have its own URL, and you can create a new URL each time you update content on your website.
Open Doors and Get Traffic With JavaScript SEO
SEO marketing is complicated because there are so many ranking factors and you have to get Googlebot to read and understand what your site is about.
Your best bet is to learn SEO basics, starting with JavaScript SEO. That ensures your site is technically sound so Google knows exactly how to process your site.
You just learned how to structure your JavaScript site without going to programming school. That improves your chances of getting found in search results and gore traffic.
Do you want tips to improve other areas of digital marketing? Check out the home page of this site for more helpful content.