Best Practices to Make Your React Website SEO-friendly

by Jay Dee AndolaSoft

What is React?

React is an open source library which has been developed and maintained by Facebook for building interactive UI components for both mobile apps and Single Page Applications (SPA). It runs on JavaScript and is popularly used by developers as it boosts productivity during the development process.

SPA problems with SEO

The way these sites are built makes it harder for search engines to crawl their content.

“What happens when you use React without server-side rendering is that the crawler halts on the very first page because it can’t see any hyperlinks to follow. It sends the page to the indexer, which then has to render the page and extracts the hyperlinks, which will then be added to the crawler’s queue. Then the crawler will eventually crawl the next set of pages, and again will stop there because all the links are invisible until the JavaScript is rendered. So it has to wait for the indexer to come back with a new set of URLs to crawl.”

But this can be improved in 2 ways

1- React Helmet

2- Isomorphic React Applications

What is a React Helmet?

React Helmet is a library that helps you deal with search engines and social media crawlers by adding meta tags to your pages/components on React so your site gives more valuable information to the crawlers.