Frontend Development › Rendering Strategies

SEO

Making pages discoverable and well ranked by search engines.

Also known as: search engine optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the work of making your pages easy for search engines to find, understand and rank. For a frontend developer, most of it comes down to a few basics:

• Each page has its own URL that returns real content, not an empty shell.
• A clear <title> and a meta description that say what the page is about.
• Real links (<a href="/products/42">), so crawlers can follow your site. A <div> with a click handler isn’t a link to them.
• Meaningful HTML: one <h1>, headings in order, and text instead of text inside images.

<head>
  <title>Trail Running Shoes | Example Shop</title>
  <meta name="description" content="Lightweight shoes for trail running, in sizes 6 to 13.">
</head>

Rendering matters too. A client-side rendered page can be indexed, but the content may only appear after the script runs, which can slow things down and make indexing less reliable. Server-rendered or pre-built pages send the content in the first response.

On the backend, SEO depends on what your server returns. A missing page should give a real 404 status, not a 200 with a “not found” message, since that “soft 404” looks like a real page to crawlers. Moved pages need a permanent 301 redirect to the new URL.

The classic mistake is treating SEO as a set of tricks, like stuffing keywords. Search engines reward pages that load quickly, have clear content and link well. Also see sitemap and robots.txt and web performance.