Is knowing or understanding JavaScript necessary for a technical SEO professional or not, has been the most debated subject in SEO sphere. As many SEO professionals deny it because “coding is not a thing which everyone likes to do” and also there is a lot more to do in SEO except coding.
But if as a SEO professional you are keen to learn JavaScript, you will end up having a lot more opportunities in your hands. Understanding JavaScript and its impact on search engine performance is a core skill-set of the modern SEO professionals.
Technical SEO was always important and its importance is growing more with the time but at the same time it is becoming more complex to understand how Google Interacts with JavaScript. And if you have those knowhow and skills of JS, you can get an edge over other SEOs. Some Companies Providing SEO Services in India, have the smart SEO Professionals in their team, who have knowledge of JavaScript also.
1. There is a number of SEOs who have a good grasp on technical SEO for static HTML, but what will make you different in this competitive world is:
• Knowing how JS works
• Where it helps SEO?
• Where it blocks or restricts SEO?
• What kind of effects are on search engines & clients?
Having these skills will make your services much more valuable.
2. There is going to be a lot more development in JavaScript in the next couple years than in the previous two decades, and learning JavaScript can provide you the competitive advantage over your competitors.
3. Meanwhile websites built with React, Angular and similar JS based technologies may be something you have to work on at times. Without the knowledge of JS you'll find it much harder to figure out how to get these sites properly indexed and optimized.
4. You may also encounter some smaller issues related to how a page functions related to JS, where certain content is not getting indexed. You may even want to leverage JS to do this on purpose in some rare cases.
5. Apart from that, analytics and other site tagging can also often end up in the SEO on a project. Even a fairly basic knowledge of JavaScript can be a huge benefit in being able to track exactly what you want, how you want on a site.
6. You don't need to be an expert front end developer, but some knowledge will go a long way to making you stand out compared to more average SEO professionals.
While writing this article I came across a case where there was a comment on a blog but it was not shown on the front end i.e. on the blog but when I saw its source code the comment was written there and that was because of AJAX. So as a normal SEO Expert someone could lost an opportunity to get a back-link from there but an smart SEO Professional having a little bit knowledge of JS and AJAX can have this opportunity in hand to get a back-link from there also.
Now the question arises, Does JavaScript affect SEO and if yes then how does it affect SEO. In the next section we are going to discuss about the effects of JavaScript on SEO:
How JavaScript Affects SEO:
The relationship between JavaScript and SEO has been one of the most talked and discussed topic in the virtual world. Creating websites using JavaScript has became very popular among modern web developers as they used this technique, with some lacking knowledge of whether search engines can understand and interpret the content on web page or not, which is rendered by JavaScript.
Meanwhile when Google changed its methodology regarding JavaScript, everybody started having a doubt, can Google or other search engines crawl JavaScript? But it was not the right question to ask, the better question is can Google Understand or Parse JavaScript Content? In simple words we can say:
“Can Google rank the Websites designed with JavaScript”?
JavaScript means more loading time speed and faster server load because in JavaScript code functions run immediately instead of waiting for the server to answer, implementation is also easier in case of JS, JS comparatively has richer interfaces and higher versatility which means can be used in a huge variety of applications. But, JavaScript SEO brings some problems in its way because lots of webmasters fail to optimize the content that uses JavaScript code.
So, the question now arises is: Does it matter that not the crawler but the indexer takes care of JavaScript? Is it important for the webmaster to know these things? Well the answer in this case is Yes, It is very important for them to know the difference in case of errors. They should know how to resolve these issues to get the desired Outcome that is “Google Ranking JavaScript Pages”.
Now, we can understand that knowing how search works, how a website is created, and the relationship between JavaScript and SEO. We can ask the right questions. Because now we have the correct answers also.
• “Does Google Crawl JavaScript?”
The answer is “No”.
• “Does Google index JavaScript?”
The answer is “YES”.
• “Should I use JavaScript?”
The answer is “It depends”.
JS websites are usually indexed and ranked. We’ve learned these things until now. And making it easier for Google to understand the generated content is the best approach to be ranked. To help Google rank content that uses JavaScript, you need tools and Plug-ins to make it SEO-friendly. When we make our content easy to discover and evaluate, we will be rewarded with better rankings in SERPs by Google or other search engines
Although JavaScript has some limitations and Google also has some issues with it, but even then most of the problems these websites have while ranking are a result of the bad implementation. It is not because Google is not able to deal with JavaScript.
Final Thought: Google find it difficult sometimes to understand and interpret the content for a website designed using JavaScript and so as to crawl and index the website. But if using some tools and plug-ins, you made your website SEO-friendly or the content on the website easy to understand and to evaluate for Google. Google will definitely rank your website higher in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Jeewangarg.com who have many inhouse SEO Experts helps you to make your web page SEO Friendly.
