Search engine optimization is essential for your website to get the most traffic. Let’s briefly look at how React can be used for search engine optimization and tackle the problems associated with it.

React websites face a lot of challenges with search engine optimization. We’ll look at some of them while we journey through this article and talk about the possible solutions.

The pros of React

– Users of React have access to control the app or page being used dynamically

– Since the components can reuse codes at any time, the website views can instantly change. This way, there’s no extra overhead for the page refresh function

The Cons of React

– It has all its components rendered in the body section, making it impossible to alter the meta tags

– It makes no provision for meta tags; you need to add page titles and descriptions for each page before you get your app to show at the top of the page in Google’s listings.

– The JavaScript loads very differently from others

What are the challenges faced with SEO of React Websites?

  • The use of single-page applications- These are web applications developed with React. This application has a single page that only loads once, and it only loads other information only when required. They are faster and have a smooth user experience than the multiple-page apps seen in the traditional system. However, this advantage becomes more of a challenge when it comes to SEO because the content is only provided when the page is loaded; so, users see an empty page when it hasn’t loaded; this way, the website faces issues in ranking in SERPs.

Steps to making your React website SEO-friendly

Pre-rendering

This is an excellent approach to making your React website SEO-friendly. This approach comes in especially handy when search bots or crawlers cannot render the web pages efficiently. Pre-renderers are unique programs that cause interception of requests into the website, and once the request is detected to be from a crawler, then pre-rendered will send a cached static HTML version of your website. Some of the good sides to Pre-rendering are that it supports recent web novelties. It only needs minimal codebase changes or even no changes at all. Its implementation is relatively easier, and it is very effective at carrying out various types of modern JavaScript and converting them into static HTML. However, some of its drawbacks include time consumption in cases where the website is large, not feasible for use in pages where data are frequently altered, and it is not free.

Server-side rendering

With server-side rendering, you have just made your work easier because the Google bots and browsers get HTML files alongside the entire content. This helps Google bots to index the page without any problems and then give it a high ranking.

Tools for improving SEO of React Websites

  1. React Router

It is an element that helps to create routes between different pages or components, thereby helping to develop websites that already have an SEO-friendly URL structure.

  1. React Helmet

It helps to manage the metadata of the corresponding web pages provided through React components.

  1. Fetch as Google

This helps users to understand the crawling process fully.