Angular Universal: How to Build Angular SEO Friendly App?

Introduction

Wondering where you can learn about Angular SEO and build Angular SEO friendly app? We are here to help you. A few days back we received a query on how to make an Angular application SEO friendly and that made us write this tutorial.

Topics covered in this tutorial:

• What is Angular SEO?
• Why Angular SEO and why is it important?
• Two approaches to making your app SEO friendly:
  ➡ Setting Titles and Metadata
  ➡ Using Angular Universal
• Github Repository of the demo application

What is Angular SEO?

SEO means Search Engine Optimization. It is used to get your Web application on top of the user’s search list on search engines. In order to get your application on one of the top searches, there are certain things we need to add to our application which we would discuss in detail further in our blog.

What is the Importance of Angular SEO?

Searchers put their trust in search engines for giving the best results possible and reaching one of the top spots on search results gives your application a reliable approach. SEO helps you increase your online visibility and online traffic to your web application. It also increases the chances to provide the services for your website to a greater number of people

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How to Build Angular SEO Friendly App?

Following are the ways you can make your Angular website SEO friendly. Let’s discuss them in detail.

1. Setting Titles and Metadata

Angular provides a Meta service for changing titles and metadata on web applications. Search Engine crawls through this data to give effective search results. There are various meta service methods-

• updateTag()
• addTag()
• removeTag()
• getTag()
• addTags()
• getTags()
• removeTagElement()

Angular also checks the duplication of meta tags, If a meta tag already exists it will not allow you to add it.

Create a Standard Angular Application with meta service

Step 1

• Create a new Angular application with the following command

ng new angular-meta-service

• Run the application with the following command

ng serve

• After serving the application you can see it on http://localhost:4200/, now check the view source of the web page. There are no major contents in tag.

Step 2

• Add meta in providers of app.module.ts.

import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';
import { BrowserModule, Meta } from '@angular/platform-browser';
import { AppRoutingModule } from './app-routing.module';
import { AppComponent } from './app.component';
@NgModule({
  declarations: [ AppComponent ],
  imports: [ BrowserModule, AppRoutingModule ],
  providers: [ Meta ], bootstrap: [AppComponent]
})
export class AppModule { }

• To add a new tag we use the addTag() method in Angular, let’s implement addTag() in app.components.ts.

import { Component } from '@angular/core';
import { Meta } from "@angular/platform-browser";
 
@Component({
  selector: 'app-root',
  templateUrl: './app.component.html',
  styleUrls: ['./app.component.css']
})
export class AppComponent {
  title = 'angular-universal';
 
  constructor(private metaService:Meta){
    this.addTag();
  }
 
  addTag(){
    this.metaService.addTags([
      { name: 'description', 
        content: 'Article Description' 
      },
      { name: 'robots', content: 'index,follow' },
      { property: 'og:title', content: 'Content Title' }
   ]);
  }
}

Step 3

• Create a build with the following command

npm run build

• You can see we have description, robots, and og:title added in tag below.

2. Angular Universal

Angular Universal is an SSR that benefits you from both server-side and client-side rendering in one app. Server-side Rendering (SSR) is a modern technique to convert a Single Page Application (SPA) running in the browser into a server-based application. Visit our tutorial SSR with Angular Universal to learn more.

Create a Standard Angular Application with SSR

Step 1

• Create a new Angular application with the following command

ng new angular-universal

• Run the application with the following command

ng serve

• After serving the application you can see it on http://localhost:4200. Now, check the view source of the web page

You can see there is no content between < app - root > < / app - root > because we haven’t implemented SSR yet.

Step 2

• Add @nguniversal/express-engine to the application with the command

ng add @nguniversal/express-engine

• Some files will be added to the project after the successful execution of the above command

• There will be changes in the package.json file as follows

Step 3
Create a build with the following command

npm run build:ssr

• Check if SSR is implemented successfully by serving the build with the following command.

npm run serve:ssr

Check the source of the page again, if we have content in between app-root tag then we successfully implemented SSR.

Github Repository: angular-seo

Feel free to clone the repository and play around with the code. Here’s the source code: angular-seo

So, this was about what is Angular SEO and how can you build Angular SEO friendly app. Here, we have discussed two approaches. You can try anyone that suits your Angular application best.

Conclusion