SEO is an important part of all web traffic and applications. If you are not optimized for the web, it will be difficult to gain any traffic for your site. While many new technologies are being introduced to the market for building platforms and web applications, we need to keep in mind these important aspects such as SEO. Such new technologies can include web components. In this article, we are going to discuss the use of web components and how this can affect your SEO.
Let’s first understand what web components are and their use.
The Use of Web Components
Web components have many great uses cases, which is why they are being adopted by many developers for building websites, web applications and other software. These components can be embedded within an application so that you can build the feature only one time without needed to rebuild or repeat the process. This works great if you have multiple applications that you are building or implementing the same feature many times within a single application and you do not want to re-write along with maintaining the same code.
You can also use pre-built web components. One example of this would be Skhemata’s web components which come with a universal API. You can learn more about pricing and the offering by going to the pricing page here. These components come optimized for SEO out of the box. But what if you are building/developing your own web components?
Things to keep in mind when you are developing web components
The first thing to consider when building components, is to structure the content so it is crawlable by search engines using a light DOM to deliver the content. You should make sure that you keep links, heading tags, and other tags available in the light DOM so that your components are SEO optimized. If, however, your content or application is only accessed when logged in or authenticated, then the use of the light DOM may not be needed.
Testing the components
With most components, you can paste the code on a page to run it within the website. If you are pasting your own code into the website, you will need to test to see if the code is SEO optimized. To do this, you will need to check with the most used search engines. This would likely be Google and Bing.
Let’s take a further dive into these tests.
GoogleBot
Once you add the component to your page, you can use Googlebot to test the code. To do this, go to your Google search console. Click on the URL Inspection option in the left menu. Now, add the URL of the page where you added your component code. Once you’ve added the code, you can then see on the right side of the page if there are any errors with your component’s SEO.
Bing
You can also check as well using the Bingbot. Log into Bing Webmaster, click on Diagnostics & Tools, then click on SEO Analyzer. You can then add the URL with your web component on it, and see if there are any issues with this search engine as well.
If you have passed both tests, you can ensure that you do have the correct SEO practices for your web components.
Also, be aware that there are many other services that you can use to do a performance review on your website. Many of these services will cover SEO. The above tools that are mentioned are free and would likely take less time/effort to test with. But it would be recommended to also test with other software that will provide a more in-depth review on your website and SEO.