Are you powering your website with Angular? If you are, you may be wondering about the search engine optimization (SEO) potential. You may have even run into some SEO issues when it comes to your Angular website. The good news is that you can still get your SEO on with Angular Universal.
It may not be extremely easy, and there are many aspects you will need to learn, such as, Docker and Helm components, as well as container registry. But, with a bit of due diligence, you can tether a powerful SEO plan to your Angular website.
DevOps will play a role here. However, the finished website/web app will be as optimized as any other high performing site. The following aims to help you on this Angular journey. Let’s dive in!
The Issue When It Comes To Angular And SEO
First off, it is important to know that Angular is a great framework for building and delivering user-friendly website apps that are modular. The downside is that it can be finicky when it comes to your website’s SEO.
There are two main issues that Angular and SEO are not so compatible. The first reason is that Angular uses script to deliver the site’s content. This makes it pretty challenging for a search engine bot, like Google’s, to see and interpret the content correctly for search engine optimization.
As you know that is a big problem. You can have the best content ever on your Angular website, but if search engine indexing bots can’t read it, it is all for nothing. Your site visitors will see great content, but they need to find it online first.
The second issue is that Angular web apps are lagging in the speed department. Apps running on Angular simply don’t load fast enough for optimal SEO ranking value.
For example, you may notice your home page is a blank screen before loading. This can affect your site’s bounce rate, and thus cause search engines like Google to decrease your page ranking.
Good News — There Are Solutions To These SEO/Angular Issues
The above issues when it comes to Angular and SEO may be disconcerting. But there are solutions to these SEO issues. You can definitely make your Angular website SEO friendly, pleasing those search engine indexing bots for great online visibility.
One solution is dynamic rendering. This allows you to generate static HTML using tools like Puppeteer, letting indexing bots and web crawlers to easily read your Angular site’s content. However, there is still the issue of page load time. For this, you can utilize Angular universal.
What Is Angular Universal Exactly?
This is a good question. And once you know what Angular Universal is, and how to deploy it, SEO is no longer an issue for your website. Angular Universal allows you to run your website app on a server, rather than in a browser. This leap frogs over the client-side app that Angular is traditionally known for.
How does this work? Normally, client-side apps and their code are not processed by search engine bots. Instead, Angular Universal puts the server-side rendering (SSR) into better terms for search bots, pre-rendering HTML and CSS content ahead of time for your site visitors.
So now your website will load static HTML instead of the clunky, hard to read client-side code. This will give you powerful SEO page load time search engines like Google love to rank. I know what you’re thinking, this is all great, but how do I switch to Angular Universal?
Running Angular Universal For Your Angular App To Maximize SEO
If you are ready to get your site’s speed back on track using Angular Universal, we compiled a little how-to. The following can help you understand a bit more about Angular and SEO, as well as cut some DevOps costs down the road.
However, you will need a bit of understanding about Angular, web servers, TypeScript, and command-line interface (CLI). To go from Angular to Angular Universal, there are a few steps involved. Let’s get right into it!
Load Up The Dependencies
This is all about Node.js. If you are pretty good with Angular, you will be able to accomplish this step pretty easily. The main aim is to integrate the dependencies for Angular Universal. You will do this using Node Package Manager using this code:
npminstall-save@angular/platform-server@nguniversal/module-map-ngfactory-loaderts-loader
It may take a few minutes to install everything, so be patient.
Next, Update Your App
To move your Angular app to Angular Universal, you will need to complete the following steps:
- Add Universal Support
- Create a server root module
- Create a main file
- Create a configuration file
This can be explained in more detail here. You can also find other resources on how to get this accomplished online. This is certainly not something new, so resources are abundant.
Develop A New Build Target
To develop a new build target you will first need to open your Angular source directory and find the angular.json file. Once you have that file, you will update it in the “architect” section. Look for something that starts with . . .
“architect”: { “build”: { … } “server”: {
With this, you can start building your app. You can start this process by entering the command line: ngrunmy-project:server.
Time To Set Up Your Server
The next step of setting up your web app for Angular Universal is to actually set up the Universal server. You will do this by running a bundle in order to serialize the app and have it return to a browser for better page load time, and better SEO.
To accomplish this, create a file called server.ts and define your app engine within it. You can find the code and more instructions on that here.
Wrapping Your Angular Universal Website Up
After the above steps are complete, you simply run the server and you are good to go. This is certainly not for beginners. But if you are familiar with Angular and a bit of development and coding, you can easily accomplish all this on your own.
Look for resources online to help you make moving to Angular Universal easier. Having Universal in place will help you accomplish your SEO goals, allowing search engines to rank your site above the competition. Have you used Angular Universal to improve your website’s SEO? We want to hear from you.