Introduction
The connection between SEO and Javascript cannot be ignored, especially in our world today. This therefore means that a little knowledge of the basics that go with Javascript is crucial for you as an SEO professional. There has been a raging debate however on whether search engine crawlers have the capacity to view content on a website properly and at the same time give a realistic evaluation of user experience. Before we go any further, it is only right that we go over the basic definitions that we will encounter in this article.The first is obviously JavaScript. By definition Javascript is a programming language that is used in the design of webpages, and helps make them dynamic and interactive. Javascript is supported by majority of the web browsers that we have today on computer and mobile devices. The next term has to be HTML. HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. This is more or less a content organizer as it gives a website its structure and defines the static content on the website.
As an SEO professional it is important that you understand these terms and know how to make Javascript work for you. In this article we will take a look at a number of practices that will optimize Javascript for Search Engine Optimization.
Best JavaScript Practices For SEO
Search engine optimization is all about ensuring that you get a higher rank that you currently have. This goes a long way in establishing your site as an authority in your field of choice. This therefore means that from a design point of view, your site should easily be accessible to search engines and their crawlers should have a full view of just how your site appears, just as your audience will view it. This goes a long way in ensuring that you do not send wrong signals to the search engine making them not rank you as high as they would if you had let their crawlers get a clear view of how your site looks like.In this regard you should give the search engine the appropriate crawling opportunity by providing the robots.txt file in your code. Failure to do this will be interpreted as cloaking by the search engine. This will leave your Search engine optimization efforts bearing no results. Provide the web crawlers with the necessary resources in your code to view your websites web pages just as your users will view them.
Search engines crawl through your website and get to know your website architecture through internal linking. Internal linking is an important aspect of search engine optimization as through it you are able to point to the webpages that are most important to your site. It is therefore important for you to use internal linking through regular anchor tags in your HTML code. This will provide your users with a better experience and crawlers will be able to crawl your site easily.
Site loading speed can also be improved or diminished by simply ensuring that your Javascript code has a number of considerations taken up. As an SEO expert you should be aware that when you have Javascript files that are huge, they will to some extent clog the load speed of your website. With this in mind, it is therefore very important that you place the essential content above the content that is huge that you need loaded. Analyze the speed of your website and pages therein and from that you can determine if the Javascript code is the one that is slowing them down. You can then take measures to reduce and remedy this issue. You can deal with this issue by reducing the number of Javascript elements that on your HTML file. Adding Javascript in the HTML also helps remedy this problem.
Other than the above, it is important for you to test your website and the Javascript code that you have. Even though web crawlers have the capacity to understand many Javascript forms there are some that may be a challenge to the crawlers. There are a number of ways that you can be able to test your site. First you can go on to test some of your pages on your site and see if google indexes your content. By doing this, you will be able to find out whether indeed your content and Javascript is able to be analyzed properly by the search engine.
Conclusion
SEO is important for success of your business on the online sphere. This means that you need to go out of your way to ensure that your website makes the best out of its online presence to drive quality traffic to your website and get those conversions that you need for you to meet your needs.Though the importance of Search engine optimization is well known to many, it should be factored in from the very development of the website. It is at this point that Javascript comes in. A well optimized website for Search engine optimization makes it easier and faster to get your content indexed and ranked higher on the search engine results page. There is one thing that most entrepreneurs and businesses forget at the very onset of their online presence. This is that their website is their number one priority and all their efforts, be it social media marketing, Search engine optimization efforts and even ad campaigns all land to your website. This goes to emphasize the point that your Javascript code should be optimized to make it easy for you to reap the benefits of incorporating Search engine optimization techniques.
Take time today and test your site and see whether the code behind your site is indeed easy to index by the search engines. This way you will save yourself time and will finally be able to get the results that you are looking for from your online campaign. There is still more to learn on this topic and this video is worth taking a look at: