If you are reading this blog you more than likely have experience with Google’s Angular framework or Angular websites. However, for those who haven’t, basically Angular is one of the most popular frameworks for user interface development.

Why Angular?

Since its launch in 2010 Angular’s market share sits at around 8.99%. However, this relatively modest percentage belies the fact that many large and recognisable companies use Angular for their front-end requirements – companies including Upwork , Paypal, and the NBA to name a few.

There are many reasons why clients and developers alike are drawn to Angular but the primary reason is that it acts like a complete toolkit that can help build large-scale applications.

According to the state of JS 2018 survey of developers using Angular in their practice, the most liked aspects of using Angular include:

• The variety of features
• The neat programming style
• Good documentation and Google support
• A rich ecosystem with both out-of-the-box and third-party tools.

The benefits of Angular as a programming tool are many, but, for years the major ‘con’ or drawback has been that Angular is perceived as not being SEO-friendly.

So why does Angular have a reputation for not being SEO-friendly?

It simply comes down to the fact that Angular uses ‘client-side rendering’ when building single-page applications. This can create some difficulties when you want to implement SEO for your website as the web crawlers of search engines cannot see either the structure or the content.

We all know how integral good SEO is to building a sustainable online marketing strategy, so, how can developers using Angular overcome this problem?

How to make your Angular website SEO-friendly

We have put together 10 easy steps to ensure your Angular website is crawled and indexed by search engines:

• Improve your site’s visibility to crawlers with active server-side rendering. Not all search engine crawlers can process JavaScript successfully or immediately. Fortunately, there are many ways around it such as implementing active server-side or dynamic rendering. A dynamic rendering tool can help you create static HTML files that the web crawlers or bots can easily consume and index. You can then direct your webserver to direct the bots to these pre-rendered pages and ‘humans’ or visitors to the Angular pages. A win-win for both user experience and SEO alike.
• Ensure that all site content is crawlable and under HTML tags as well as having good internal linking with anchor tags with Href attributes in your content.
• Check that all web pages contain the basics of SEO including a meta title, a meta description and title tags.
• Test and monitor your website’s page speed through Google Lighthouse on a regular basis. Remember, the average person’s attention span is only 8 seconds so that makes it important for all pages to load quickly to avoid a high bounce rate which can have a negative impact on SEO.
• Make sure that all of your website URLs do not contain any special characters or underscore i.e. only consistent, unique and crawlable URLs.
• Check that your URLs reflect the structure of your website. Well-structured URLs give your users immediate insight into a page’s topic and its location within the website.
• Use Canonical URLs to indicate primary content. See the below example:
  
  
• In your XML sitemap regularly check that all the webpages are active, linked to the website and there are no error codes.
• Use as many HTML tags as much as possible on your website.
• When you have completed steps 1 to 9, use Google Search Console, click on URL inspection and then Fetch your web pages accordingly.

By following these 10 easy steps, you can ensure your Angular website is crawled and indexed by search engines or SEO-friendly.

Need some assistance making your Angular website SEO-friendly?

Find out more about our SEO services here or contact us to discuss how we can tailor an SEO solution for your business.