17 May 2018
8 steps to make powerful Meteor Apps SEO friendly

8 steps to make powerful Meteor Apps SEO friendly

By Philomathes in Web Development

Why Meteor?

Meteor is a full-stack framework that uses JavaScript both the front and the back end. You just have to build a web application with Meteor and it is automatically real-time. Consequently, a front-end developer can also work on the back-end comfortably with Meteor without switching between languages.
In a nutshell, one code is supported on a client and a server. You can define which functions should be performed on the client’s side and which on the server’s, and split the code. The core is powered by DDP (Distributed Data Protocol) used for real-time transfer of JSON objects across the application’s front end, server part and DB (MongoDB default and enough). This is the feature that provides real-time updates.
Just like any other JS stack, Meteor JS has got all its bases covered when it comes to satisfying the requirements of any search engine.

Making Meteor Apps SEO friendly –

  1. Prerender your Meteor app, if the App is hosted on Galaxy then use meteor’s prerender.io package, meteor adds mdg:SEO. If you aren’t on galaxy, don’t worry you can still set up prerender in your app.
  2. Add meta tags to your pages by using any of the following packages (please note there are plenty of packages available on the atmosphere)
    • When using Blaze App with Flow router, you can use ostrio:flow-router-meta.
    • For Blaze App using Iron Router, you can use manuelshoebel:ms-SEO
    • With React apps, you can use React Helmet
    • There are plenty of other packages out there, feel free to leave a comment if we missed a good one.
  3. Create sitemap, again plenty of options available but the popular one is gadicohen: sitemaps. Make sure you submit your sitemap using Google Webmaster
  4. Create a robots.txt file
  5. Include no-index meta tags on pages you don’t want search engines to index. Check out meteor/gadicohen:robots-txt.
  6. Page 404 a hell no, always ensure you either route back the user to the homepage or put up a page with links to trending pages.
  7. Use optimized images with alt tags.
  8. Packages like wizonesolutions: canonical enforce canonical URLs so that https://vayuz.com is the same as https://www.vayuz.com.
A green tick for the aforementioned makes your Meteor App search engine friendly, but at the end of the day if you have traffic on your platform then Google is smart enough to rank your site pretty high up.
About Philomathes Jigyasu

Philomathes (pronounced as fillo-MAY-thus) is a fictional character at VAYUZ (https://www.vayuz.com), who is on a never ending journey called “LEARNING”. In a way, Philomathes embodies VAYUZ - Way of life, which is if you are not learning then you are not breathing. The word Philomathes, comes from the Greek roots philo and philein meaning "to love" and the Greek roots mathos (MAH-thos) and mathesis (muh-THAYSIS) meaning “learning”. Philomathes through his Blogs and Vlogs (Video Blogs) will share his experience, learnings and thoughts. In his tryst to learn and understand, he would also seek answers to questions. So if you would like to join him in this incredible journey called “ life” then feel free to write to him on philomathes.jigyasu@vayuz.com. Always remember, knowledge is all around us, we just need to keep our guards down and senses on.

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