Now in this article, we will be going to learn and see how is React SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), as you all know in SEO the best library is Next.js but compare to that we can do work with React SEO. As y'all know that react is often very popular for frontend web development it is more efficient, faster, etc.

We'll be going to see why React is challenging for SEO and outlines what software engineers can do to improve the search rankings of React websites. React was developed to create interactive UIs that are declarative, modular, and cross-platform.

Today, it is one of the most popular libraries among us. It is used to create highly fledged websites and mobile applications. If you'd have extensive experience in conventional development and move to React, you will notice an increasing amount of HTML and CSS code moving into JavaScript. This is because React doesn't recommend directly creating or updating UI elements but instead describing the "state" of the UI.

React will then update the DOM to match the state in the most efficient way. As a result, all the changes to the UI or DOM must be made via React's Engine. Although convenient for developers, this may even take longer loading times for users and more work for search engines to find and index the content. In this article, we will address challenges faced while building SEO-performant React apps and websites, and we will outline several strategies used to overcome them.

Let's see the strategies of React's Search Engine optimization. Why Optimizing React for SEO is challenging Yet, Software engineers should identify the potential issues faced by search engines trying to crawl and index React Pages, Now we can take a close look at what makes React SEO challenging and what developers can do to address and overcome some of those challenges.

Empty First-Pass Content We know that React applications rely heavily on javascript, and they often run into problems with search engines. This is because React employs an app shell model by default. The initial HTML does not contain any meaningful content, and a user or a bot must have executed JavaScript to see the page's actual content. This approach means that the Googlebot detects an empty page during the first pass, The content is seen by Google only when the page is rendered. This will delay the indexing of content when dealing with thousands of pages. Loading Time and its UX Fetching, parsing, and executing javascript really takes a lot of time as we all have worked with react so we do know this clearly, Further, JavaScript may need to make network calls to fetch content, and the user might have need to wait for a while before they can view the requested information. While Google has laid out a set of web vitals related to user experience, used in its ranking criteria, A longer time may affect the user experience score, prompting google to rank a site lower. We can review the website performance by going on Chrome's Lighthouse.

Page Metadata Meta tags are helpful because they allow Google and other social media websites to show appropriate titles, thumbnails, and descriptions for pages. But these websites rely on the tag of the fetched webpage to get this information. These websites do not execute JavaScript for the target page. React renders all the content, including meta tags, on the client. Since the app shell is the same for the entire website/application, it may be hard to adapt the metadata for individual pages.

Sitemap A sitemap is a file where we provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on our site and the relationship between the, Search Engines like Google read this file to more intelligently crawl on your site. React does not have a built-in way to generate sitemaps. If you are using React Router to handle strong routing, you can find some tools that can generate a sitemap so it may require some effort. Other SEO Considerations These considerations are related to setting up good SEO Practices in general. Have an optimal URL structure to give humans and search engines a good idea about what to except on the page. Optimizing the robots.txt file can help search bots understand how to crawl pages on your website. Use a CDN to serve all the static assets like CSS, JS, fonts, etc. and use responsive images to reduce the load times.

We can address many of the problems outlined above by using server-side rendering (SSR) or pre-rendering. We will review these approaches below. Enter Isomorphic React The dictionary definition of isomorphic is "corresponding or similar in form." In React terms, this means that the server has a similar form to the client. In other words, you can reuse the same React components on the server and client. This isomorphic approach enables the server to render the React app and send the rendered version to our users and search engines so they can view the content instantly while JavaScript loads and executes in the background. Frameworks like Next.js or Gatsby have popularized this approach. We should note that isomorphic components can look substantially different than conventional React components. For example, they can include code that runs on the server instead of the client. They can even include API secrets (although server code is stripped out before being sent to the client). One point to note is that these frameworks abstract away a lot of complexity but also introduce an opinionated way of writing code. We will dig into the performance trade-offs further in this article. We will also do a matrix analysis to understand the relationship between render paths and website performance. But before that, let's go through some basics of measuring website performance. Metrics for Website Performance Let's examine some of the factors search engines use to rank websites. Apart from answering a user's query quickly and accurately, Google believes that a good website should have the following attributes: It should load quickly. Users should be able to access content without too much waiting time. It should become interactive to a user's actions early. It should not fetch unnecessary data or execute expensive code to prevent draining a user's data or battery.

These features map roughly to the following metrics: TTFB: Time to First Byte - The time between clicking a link and the first bit of content coming in. LCP: Largest Contentful Paint - The time when the requested article becomes visible. Google recommends keeping this value under 2.5 seconds. TTI: Time To Interactive - The time at which a page becomes interactive (a user can scroll, click, etc.). Bundle size - The total number of bytes downloaded and code executed before the page became fully visible and interactive.

We will revisit these metrics to better understand how various rendering paths may affect each one of them.

Client-side Rendering (CSR) Client-side rendering is the default render path for a React SPA. The server will serve a shell app that doesn't contain any content. Once the browser downloads, parses, and executes included JavaScript sources, the HTML content is populated or rendered. The routing function is handled by the client app by managing the browser history. This means that the same HTML file is served irrespective of which route was requested, and the client updates its view state after it is rendered. Code splitting is relatively straightforward. You can split your code using dynamic imports or React.lazy such that only needed dependencies are loaded based on route or user actions. If the page needs to fetch data from the server to render content - say, a blog title or product description - it can do so only when the relevant components are mounted and rendered. The user will most likely see a "Loading data" sign or indicator while the website fetches additional data. Server-side Rendering to Static Content (SSRS) For example, if we are building an online calculator and the user issues a query of the sort /calculate/34+15 (leaving out URL escaping). We need to process the query, evaluate the result, and respond with generated HTML. Our generated HTML is quite simple in structure and we don't need React to manage and manipulate the DOM once the generated HTML is served. So we are just serving HTML and CSS content. You can use the renderToStaticMarkup method to achieve this. The routing will be entirely handled by the server as it needs to recompute HTML for each result, although CDN caching can be used to serve responses faster. CSS files can also be cached by the browser for faster subsequent page loads.

Conclusion While in this article i've tried to cover each and every points about React's Search Engine optimisation. I highly recommend you to read this full article to understand how does it work and how the Googles rank's it. The Strategies best techniques like rendering and dyanmaic rendering will got you cover in this article. I Hope you like this article and found this interesting topic to read, if you need more such articles like this Follow me for more.