SEO Guide to Angular: Everything You Need to Know

Angular is undoubtedly one of the most popular web development frameworks that developers world over prefer to use for their projects. But in spite of its powerful features and a variety of performance-savvy attributes, Angular is known to have a terrible shortcoming. Yes, Angular is regarded to be less friendly to search engine crawlers. This requires any Angular development company to deal with an additional barrier to optimize the website for search engines.  Here through the length of this post, we will try to understand this stumbling block that Angular developers need to cross and we will provide the most effective measures to deal with this. 

Understanding The SEO Problem of Angular

While Angular is a feature-rich and high-performance JavaScript framework to build highly modular and user optimized websites. In spite of so many attributes, Angular is known to be less friendly to SEO. There are basically two reasons behind this. First of all, Angular for delivering content to the users depends more on the script than other frameworks, and that unfortunately instead of showing content to the search engine crawlers expose some code as well. This accompanying source code with the content is a key challenge for search engine visibility. The second problem is the loading speed of Angular websites. Angular in comparison to other web development frameworks is slow in loading speed. Most Angular websites show an empty screen before displaying the web content.  Since slower loading speed can take a serious toll on the search engine ranking of websites, it is a serious problem from the SEO perspective and to resolve this the professional SEO services company can help you.

What Google Says In Defence 

Google offers reassurance that its search engine crawlers can easily find content in script-driven websites and this doesn’t cause a ranking problem. But the experts in the majority are not fully convinced by this defence. According to experts, the extra hurdle may not put all Angular websites in the problem but can cause problems for a few and you never know whether the bad omen is actually waiting for your Angular website. On the other hand, except for Google, for other search engines, you face the same problem. This is why experts believe that by opting for Angular, a website can lose a significant amount of traffic.

What Are The Proven Solutions To These Problems? 

Obviously, these problems are not the end of the world for your website SEO checklist. If you have an Angular website and are worried about these problems, you may find some time tested solutions that other Angular websites found incredibly helpful. 

• A common and widely appreciated solution is to opt for dynamic rendering. For this, you can use popular tools like Puppeteer that generates static HTML files to help web crawlers search your content easily. 
• Another supplementary method is to configure the webserver to channelize the search bots to pages already rendered by the human visitors.  

While both the above-mentioned options are pretty effective in helping the search bots find content for ranking, they are still not solutions for boosting the speed of the web app. This is where the role of Angular Universal seems to be more important. 

What Angular Universal Does? 

Angular Universal is an Angular based tool that can run the website on a server instead of running the same in the browser. While Angular apps are basically client-side apps in nature, Angular Universal turns them into server-side apps. Since search engine crawlers don’t process client-side code but do the same for server-side code, your Angular website content run on the server gets discoverable thanks to Angular Universal.  Since it renders the HTML page for the browser, the loading time gets quicker. With Angular Universal, both issues corresponding to the finding of content by search engine crawlers and speed are resolved. 

Angular Universal, A Winning Solution For Digital Marketers 

For anyone into digital marketing, much of the efforts lie in getting more online exposure and traction from the users. This is why marketers go with all-out efforts to become visible in search engine ranks. But if the site is not indexed by search engine crawlers, your website cannot rank.  While on the one hand, your Angular website suffers from poor search engine exposure and difficulties in getting indexed, the slow loading speed is another pull-back factor that undermines the ranking chances of your website content. This is where Angular Universal comes as an effective choice addressing the issues concerning search engine discoverability and loading speed at the same time. 

How To Use The Angular Universal For Your Angular Web App? 

Now that the value proposition of Angular Universal is clear to you, it is important to know the methods for running the Angular web app into Angular Universal. You need to follow the following steps to implement Angular Universal for your web app. 

• First, install the required dependencies
• Update your Angular app
• By using the Command Line Interface create an Angular Universal bundle
• Now, set up your destined server to deploy the Angular Universal bundle
• At last, run your Angular app on the server. 

Let’s explain all these steps briefly. 

• Installing Dependencies

Since for Angular apps, Node.js comes as the runtime for piling the TypeScript code into the JavaScript app, you need to install the Node Package Manager or npm for the purpose of installing the dependencies.

• Updating The Angular App

At the very next step, you require preparing the Angular app for running in Angular Universal. This is done in four specific steps as mentioned below.

• First, add Angular Universal support by going to the root module. 
• At the next step, build the server root module followed by creating AppServerModule. Ensure that the ServerModule takes along the platform-server dependency.
• Now, build the main file for the Angular Universal bundle. 
• Now, at last build a configuration file with JSON format. 

• Creating a Target For The Development 

Now go to the Angular source directory and find a file called angular.json. Now, update this file in the section entitled “architect”. Now you are ready for app development. 

• Setting Up Server

At this step, you have to set up an Angular Universal server for deploying the bundle. For this build, a new file named server.ts and right inside the file determines the app engine.

• Deploying The App On The Server

For deploying the app on the server create a web pack to deal with the server.ts file built in the earlier step.

Conclusion 

In spite of the fact that Angular is an awesome framework that helps developers to build high-quality dynamic applications in quick time, Angular apps have their own problems corresponding to search engine visibility. But this doesn’t take away the core value proposition of the Angular framework.  We now have Angular Universal for easily pre-rendering Angular app pages with static HTML code so that they can be easily indexed by search engines. Apart from easy search engine indexing, these pre-rendered HTML pages also load faster, solving the speed issue of Angular as well. With so much promise from Angular Universal, the Angular web app can be relieved of the SEO worries for the years to come.  Author Bio: Atman Rathod is the Co-founder at CMARIX TechnoLabs Pvt. Ltd., a leading web and mobile app development company with 16+ years of experience. He loves to write about technology, startups, entrepreneurship, and business. His creative abilities, academic track record, and leadership skills made him one of the key industry influencers as well. Read Also:  SEO Basics: How To Write A Killer Meta Description How To Conduct A Technical SEO Audit Of A Site: Detailed Checklist