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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization is a very broad topic - there are multiple factors that have to be considered when working on improving it. In this document I will list potential areas of improvement that would help improve SEO of the Catalog of Digital Solutions.

To learn more about SEO in Next.js applications I followed the following guide: https://nextjs.org/learn/seo/introduction-to-seo

Areas of improvement

Crawling and Indexing

Error 404 and 500 pages

Create a 500.js file in the pages directory

Robots.txt file

A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages or files the crawler can or can't request from your site.

Create a robots.txt file in the public directory

XML sitemap

(Sitemaps) indicate the URLs that belong to your website and when they update so that Google can easily detect new content and crawl your website more efficiently.

Create a sitemap.xml file in the public directory OR use getServerSideProps function

Meta tags

Can be an alternative to creating a global, single robots.txt file. Meta tags, by contrast, are added per-page.

Meta robot tags are directives that search engines will always respect. Adding these robots tags can make the indexation of your website easier.

Add metatags in Header component

Rendering and Ranking

Rendering strategy

Currently all pages within the app are rendered on the client-side (browser). This strategy is known as Client Side Rendering (CSR):

(…) in general Client-Side Rendering is not recommended for optimal SEO.

Therefore, to improve SEO either Static Site Generation (SSG) or Server-Side Rendering (SSR) rendering strategy should be used:

The most important thing for SEO is that page data and metadata is available on page load without JavaScript. In this case SSG or SSR are going to be your best options.

Rendering strategy can be selected per-page.

Use SSG (best) or SSR (second best) rendering strategy wherever possible

Metadata

Metadata is the abstract of the website's content and is used to attach a title, a description, and an image to the site.

Current SERP snippet with a Title and Description (1)