How to Improve SEO on Angular Websites Using Angular Universal

Building websites with Angular is ideal for creating dynamic and interactive web applications. Angular is a widely used and popular software framework for developing web pages and applications. The application works well on tables and parking lots and has many useful features. 

However, Angular can face some challenges in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Search engines sometimes have trouble reading content in Angular, which can affect your website's ranking in search results.

In this article, we'll look at how you can make your Angular website SEO-friendly using technologies like Angular Universal. But first, let's look at some important stats to understand how widely Angular is used.

Why Choose Angular?

Angular is a popular framework for building modern websites, especially Single-Page Applications (SPAs). SPAs load web pages quickly without refreshing, creating a smooth user experience. 

Big names like Gmail, Google, Forbes, Weather.com, and PayPal use Angular to handle high traffic and deliver fast, dynamic websites.

Angular stands out from other JavaScript frameworks because of its strong community support. Backed by Google, Angular continues to grow, ensuring long-term reliability. It also has a large network of developers, so if you face challenges, help is just a question away.

Angular may not be as popular as React, but it remains a great option for SEO-friendly websites. It’s perfect for building scalable and fast applications.

Why Is It Essential to Make Your Website ‘Crawler Friendly’?

Search engine crawlers, bots, or spiders, scan websites to understand their content and add it to the search index. If your site isn’t crawled, it won’t appear in search results, which means losing valuable traffic. Crawling is a continuous process where bots revisit websites to find new pages and update existing ones.

A crawler-friendly website ensures that bots can easily access and interpret content. Search engines may struggle to index your site without proper optimization, leading to lower visibility and traffic.

While Angular builds scalable apps, it relies heavily on JavaScript, making crawling difficult. This is where using Angular Universal SEO allows you to implement server-side rendering (SSR). It makes your content accessible to bots. 

Using the right Angular SEO techniques helps bots crawl and index your content. This can improve your search rankings and boost organic traffic.

Angular SEO Challenges

With Google’s new updates, it’s clear that websites using Angular can rank higher in search results. But before discussing how to do SEO for Angular, let's look at some of the key challenges you must overcome.

Page Loading Speed Issues

Page speed is important for ranking well on Google. Unfortunately, Angular has a problem here. While Angular websites are stable and easy to use, they often don’t load quickly. When you first visit an Angular website, it might show a blank screen for a few seconds while the page loads. 

This delay can make visitors leave the site before seeing anything, which hurts the website’s chances of ranking higher. If visitors leave quickly, the site's bounce rate increases, which can lower its position on Google.

Bots Can't See the Content

If search engine bots can’t find the content on your site, it won’t appear in search results. Angular sites have this issue because they only show content when directed and don’t automatically load all the data. This means Angular sites may struggle to display important metadata and information, which can hurt their search engine rankings.

Visitors see content, but bots often can’t. Content loads via an API, which bots can’t read as they do HTML. Thus, bots miss essential information to rank your site.

In simple terms, Angular websites show content through an API instead of regular HTML. This makes it harder for search engines to find all the data, which hurts your ranking.

Meta Tags and Dynamic Content

Managing meta tags in Angular can also be tricky. Meta tags (like the title, description, and keywords) help search engines understand what each page is about. However, Angular apps are dynamic, changing based on user actions or navigation. 

While you can change these tags as users navigate, search engines may not always capture these changes if JavaScript is disabled. This makes it hard to ensure that each page has the right metadata for indexing.

URL Structure and Routing

Angular applications often use client-side routing. This creates URLs that are difficult for search engines to understand. If routing isn't set up correctly, it can lead to problems with indexing and crawling. Search engines might not recognize or navigate through the dynamic routes of a single-page application.

How to Make an Angular Website SEO-Friendly

Developing an SEO-friendly Angular website is challenging because of its dynamic nature. However, the good news is that there are practical solutions to overcome these challenges. As a top front-end JavaScript framework, Angular has fixed these SEO issues. It now has tools and methods to make your site user-friendly and SEO-friendly.

Let's explore the best methods to make your Angular website SEO-friendly:

1. Dynamic Rendering

One important technique to improve SEO is dynamic rendering. This means generating HTML files that search engines can easily read and index. Dynamic rendering makes everything on your page easily indexable by search engines. This includes links, text, images, and SEO tags. It won't slow down the user experience.

Use Angular Universal SEO to help search engines crawl and index initial static HTML pages. This technology ensures fast content loading, preventing users from seeing blank screens. Additionally, lazy loading boosts performance. It breaks your site into smaller parts and loads only what is necessary to make it faster.

2. Setting Title and Meta Tags for Angular SEO

Search engines use titles and meta tags to understand the content of your pages. In Angular, you can change these tags dynamically using Angular modules. For example, in your  home.component.ts file, add code. It should update the title and meta description based on the page content.  

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

@Component({
  selector: 'app-home',
  templateUrl: './home.component.html',
  styleUrls: ['./home.component.css']
})
export class HomeComponent implements OnInit {
  constructor(private meta: Meta, private title: Title) {
    this.meta.addTags([
      { name: 'description', content: 'Home page of SEO friendly app' },
      { name: 'author', content: 'buttercms' },
      { name: 'keywords', content: 'Angular, ButterCMS' }
    ]);
    this.setTitle('Home Page');
  }

  public setTitle(newTitle: string) {
    this.title.setTitle(newTitle);
  }

  ngOnInit() {
  }
}

Once you do this, the title and metadata will change as users navigate the site. However, the page source won't reflect these changes, so this method works only if JavaScript is enabled. Although dynamic rendering helps with SEO, it doesn't improve page load speed. Pre-rendering can help, but it also has limitations. It’s a good idea to use Angular Universal for SEO to improve both SEO and page load speed. 

This pre-renders pages on the server, making them easier for search engines to index. Use Angular SEO techniques, like structured data and optimized routing. They help build SEO-friendly websites that perform better and rank higher in search results.

3. Understanding The Need For Pre-Rendering

Pre-rendering is important for improving the SEO of an Angular website, and Angular Universal helps a lot with this. It makes the pages load faster and helps search engines easily find and index your content. 

Using Angular Universal, your website can show content quickly. It does this with server-side rendering (SSR). The server sends a fully ready page to the user. 

This improves performance and the user experience. It also supports techniques like lazy loading, where parts of the app load only when needed, speeding things up. 

Angular's Change Detection feature helps update the page smoothly, making the site more efficient. Using these SEO techniques, you can create SEO-friendly Angular websites that perform better. Knowing how Angular Universal for SEO can improve your site is useful before hiring an Angular Development Services team.

a. What is Angular Universal?

Angular Universal is a technology provided by Angular. It enables Angular to render the application on the server, rather than in the browser. A single-page application (SPA) runs entirely in the browser. But Angular Universal runs on the server and then in the browser. This process is called server-side rendering (SSR). Using Angular Universal can boost your app's SEO. It will improve your Angular web app's performance and accessibility.

b. How Angular Universal works

Angular Universal helps with SEO and user experience by pre-rendering HTML and CSS on the server. This means the user sees the content faster, and load times are shorter. After showing the pre-rendered content, the browser loads the full Angular app. It handles the SPA's dynamic features. This method combines fast load times with a SPA's interactivity. But, it adds complexity by mixing server and client-side rendering.

4. Implementing Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is a technique that improves the speed of your website. It only loads parts of the app when they’re needed instead of loading everything at once. 

For example, when a user visits your site, the most important parts are loaded first, and other sections load later. 

This makes the website faster and more responsive, which helps improve the user experience. Plus, search engines rank faster-loading pages better, which is great for SEO.

5. Use Prerendering

Prerendering generates static HTML pages at build time for certain parts of your site, like landing pages. These pre-built pages are available immediately, so search engines can crawl and index your content faster. 

// angular.json
"architect": {
  "build": { ... },
  "prerender": {
    "builder": "@angular-devkit/build-angular:prerender",
    "options": {
      "routes": ["/", "/about", "/contact"]
    }
  }
}

Using Angular’s @angular/platform-server package makes it easy to set up prerendering. It is beneficial for pages that need to be indexed quickly, like important landing pages.

6. Using Server-side Rendering (SSR)

Server-side rendering (SSR) with Angular means rendering your website’s content on the server instead of in the browser. This helps search engines access your content right away, improving SEO. 

SSR also speeds up the user experience, especially for people on slow devices or networks. When you use SSR, your website is faster, and search engines can easily index your pages, which helps improve rankings.

7. Generating Sitemap and Robots.txt

A sitemap and robots.txt file help search engines index your website more effectively. A sitemap lists all the pages you want search engines to crawl, while robots.txt tells them which pages to ignore or focus on. 

For example, you might want to prevent search engines from crawling certain site areas, like the admin section, while directing them to your main content. These tools ensure search engines can find and rank your most important pages.

SEO with Angular Universal: A Tool for Better Search Rankings

Angular Universal for SEO is not just about making your app faster. It also helps your website show up better on search engines. When search engines like Google visit your site, they look for static HTML pages. This is because static pages are easier for search engines to read. Angular Universal helps by turning your dynamic Angular app into static HTML pages. This makes your site more SEO-friendly.

The Pre-rendering Process of Angular Universal

To start the pre-rendering process in Angular Universal, you use the command npm run preRender. This command will generate static HTML files for your Angular app. It will use the components in your app.

Once these pages are pre-rendered and sent to the client with a response header containing Content-Type: text/html. This is important because it signals to search engines and web crawlers that the pages were rendered on the server side. This helps with search engine optimization (SEO) by allowing search engines to index the pages more effectively.

Additionally, Angular Universal offers the .routesFile option. This allows you to specify exactly which routes or pages should be pre-rendered. Use Angular SEO techniques for Angular Universal. Focus on rendering only the most important pages, like landing pages and key content. 

Don't waste resources on less important ones. This can significantly save time and server resources while ensuring that the right pages are crawled for better SEO. This approach is key to creating SEO-friendly Angular websites that perform better in search engine rankings.

Now that we've covered the pre-rendering process. Let's move on to how you can add metadata to your Angular website to improve its SEO further.

Angular SEO - Implementing meta tags for an Angular website

Meta tags are small details that help search engines and other websites understand what a page is about. In Angular, a popular tool for building sites, there is a special feature called the Meta service that helps you manage these tags.

Developers can easily manage meta tags with the Meta service. To add a website description, use: meta.addTag({name: 'description', content: 'your description here'}). Replacing 'your description here' with a page summary.

The Meta service also allows checking and updating existing tags, which lets you display different tags based on the page viewed. This improves website flexibility, especially with frequent content updates.

Besides basic tags like "description" or "keywords," Angular’s Meta service can also handle other types of tags. These can control things like your page's appearance on different devices or who wrote the content. Remember, all meta tags must be placed in your web page's <head> section to work correctly.

Closing Thoughts

SEO best practices and Google’s algorithm updates are always changing. It’s important to keep up with the latest techniques and trends and adjust your strategy when needed.

Adding these practices to your Angular development workflow, you can ensure your website is optimized for search engines and can be indexed correctly.

Making your website functional is important, but ensuring that search engines can find it is crucial too. Angular is great for building single-page apps. But it had some SEO issues until Angular Universal came along. 

This guide covers everything from needing SEO-friendly Angular websites to using Angular Universal for better SEO.

Using the right Angular SEO techniques for Angular Universal will help your site rank better. If you need help, you can always reach out to experts to ensure you’re using the best solutions.