The higher the rank of your website, the better traffic you will get and ultimately better chances of lead conversion. If talking about the best JavaScript libraries that allow you to make your website SEO-friendly, React JS should be at the top of the list.
Make your React website SEO-friendly
Prerendering
Prerendering is a common approach used to make single as well as multi-page web apps SEO-friendly. Pre-rendering has a lighter server payload. However, it is also true that most prerendering services are paid and do not work well with dynamically changing content. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of prerendering in detail.
Server-side rendering
If you’re only planning to build a React web app, you need to know the difference between client-side and server-side rendering. Client-side rendering means that a browser and the Google bot get empty HTML files or files with little content.
Why React
Stability in code
When it comes to React JS, you should not be worried about the maintainability of the code at all. Because when you have to change something in a code, that specific component will be changed; The basic structure will not be changed at all.
React offers a workable development toolset
When you are working with React JS, your coding process is going to be simpler as you have a developer toolkit with you. With this toolkit, the development process becomes easier and helps developers save a lot of time.
Build static or dynamic web apps
Static and dynamic apps use server-side rendering which helps web crawlers to access their pages easily. The good news is that you don’t always have to choose a SPA (Single-page application). It all depends on the online business you want to build.
React JS is declarative
In React JS, the DOM is declarative. We can create interactive UIs by changing the state of the component as well; React JS automatically updates the DOM. This means that you don’t actually need to interact with the DOM.
Thus, it is quite simple to build interactive UIs and debug them. All you have to do is change the state of the program and see if the UI looks good or not. You can make changes without worrying about the DOM.
url case
Google bot always treats some pages as different when their URL contains lowercase or uppercase (/Invision and /invision). Now these two URLs will be considered different because of the difference in their case. To avoid these common mistakes, always try to generate your URLs in lower case.
Use <a href> only when necessary
A common error with SPA is using <div> or <button> to replace URL. It’s not a problem with React itself, but with how the library is used. But the problem is about search engine, Google bots process one URL, and they find more URLs to crawl in <a href> elements.
Conclusion
There are many challenges you may face while building an SEO-friendly React app. They’re all infallible, however, and they certainly don’t make it worth avoiding React and all of its awesome capabilities.
To make the SPA(Single-page application) visible to Google crawlers and available for indexing, you can opt for pre-rendering or server-side rendering.