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SEO in Nextjs

Introduction​

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a vital aspect of any web development project. It helps to improve website visibility on search engines, leading to increased traffic and potentially, higher conversions. In this tutorial, we will discuss how to optimize your Next.js application for search engines.

What is SEO?​

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It's a process of optimizing your website to get organic, or un-paid, traffic from the search engine results page. Good SEO practices make your website more attractive to a search engine, which will then place your site higher on the results page.

SEO in Next.js​

Next.js is a JavaScript framework that helps you build server-side rendering and static web applications. One of the reasons why Next.js is popular among developers is its built-in SEO support. The framework allows you to easily manage and customize meta tags, which play a crucial role in SEO.

Adding Meta Tags​

Meta tags provide metadata about your webpage. This data is not displayed on the page but can be parsed by web crawlers. Meta tags can be added in the <Head> component in Next.js.

import Head from 'next/head'

export default function HomePage() {
  return (
    <div>
      <Head>
        <title>Page Title</title>
        <meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale=1.0, width=device-width" />
        <meta name="description" content="A description of the page" />
      </Head>
      <p>Hello world!</p>
    </div>
  )
}

Server Side Rendering (SSR)​

One of the great features of Next.js is its support for Server Side Rendering (SSR). SSR means that your page is rendered on the server side before it is sent to the client. This is beneficial for SEO as it allows search engine crawlers to see the fully rendered page instead of an empty div, which is what they would see with a client-side rendered application.

Next.js provides a method called getServerSideProps to fetch data at request time, which is ideal for SEO purposes.

Here is an example:

export async function getServerSideProps(context) {
  const res = await fetch(`https://.../data`)
  const data = await res.json()

  if (!data) {
    return {
      notFound: true,
    }
  }

  return {
    props: { data }, 
  }
}

export default function Page({ data }) {
  // Render data...
}

Pre-rendering​

Pre-rendering is another feature that makes Next.js great for SEO. It means that Next.js generates the HTML for a page in advance, instead of rendering it client-side. Therefore, the browser can start rendering the HTML from the server without having to wait for all JavaScript to be downloaded and executed.

There are two forms of pre-rendering: Static Generation and Server-side Rendering. The difference is in when it generates the HTML for a page.

  • Static Generation is the pre-rendering method that generates the HTML at build time. The pre-rendered HTML is then reused on each request. It can be used with and without data.

  • Server-side Rendering is the pre-rendering method that generates the HTML on each request.

To use Static Generation, you can use the getStaticProps function in Next.js.

export async function getStaticProps(context) {
  return {
    props: {}, // will be passed to the page component as props
  }
}

Conclusion​

SEO is a crucial part of any web application, and Next.js provides several built-in features like meta tags, server-side rendering, and pre-rendering to make optimizing your website easier. By following the methods described above, you can ensure that your Next.js application is optimized for search engine visibility.