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 While JavaScript
brings some smooth, beautifying features and functions to a website
that enhance the total user experience, it's not really beneficial for
improving your visibility or elevating your rankings in Google.
It doesn't necessarily ruin your SEO efforts, but you need to decide if
taking the time to create the code is worth it for you.
What JavaScript Does
- Attracts attention
- Makes a site less boring and vanilla
- Adds pop-ups, images and animations
- Takes you to another page for further info
- Enables web developers to manage/ maintain website
What JavaScript Doesn't
- Help rankings in search engines
- Get picked up by Web crawlers
Impact of JavaScript on SEO
JavaScript alone isn't necessarily good or bad for SEO, as the
search engines pretty much ignore it. You could argue, however, that
while it can help make a website more pleasant to visit, the difficulty
spiders have following JavaScript has a negative impact on your
rankings. Thus, the basic thing you need to remember is that the search
engine spiders don't crawl JavaScript, so at the very least you should
avoid using it as the only location for your keywords. Site Search
isn't able to index content,
Also, comments in HTML are ignored by the search engines - and
navigational links and content offered via JavaScript are ignored,
too. This can impact your SEO because your links and content are
top level factors for ranking and trustworthiness. Make sure you have
normal HTML navigational links on the page and remove navigation from
JavaScript so you don't inadvertently lock search engines out of
important areas of your site.
Another important SEO consideration is that JavaScript tends to slow
down page loading time, which might have an impact on your rankings.
Luckily, you can get around this by externalizing this function calling
on it only when required by the client.
Think about this, too - an issue that Google in particular has with
JavaScript is that it tends to assume that the site is serving up
different content and navigation to the user than to the search
engines. This is a tactic commonly used by adult and gambling
sites, so it's not always great for a site's reputation.
Using JavaScript
Search engines are getting better at reading JavaScript, but you
should never substitute it for regular link navigation. It's certainly
fine to use JavaScript, but the trick is in finding the right balance -
between solid SEO practices such as well-written content and keyword
rich meta titles, H1 tags, strong backlinks, etc. and fun extras that
come in the form of JavaScript and other components of Web page design.
And, while Web crawlers can't see images or videos, you could try using
alt tags to describe them - just remember they don't have the same
value as good, old-fashioned links.
There are some sites that are naturals for using JavaScript well;
for example, e-commerce sites that require lots of images, but static
content has the greatest chance of being indexed by search engines.
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