Understanding the Basics of JavaScript SEO

One of the main reasons any brand needs a digital marketing agency to boost its web presence and reach online is the knowledge an agency would have on the technicalities or fundamentals behind various digital marketing services. If you take a service like SEO, for instance, it may seem quite simple; you bring a website to the top of a search engine results page in order to increase page visits.

However, SEO or any service provided by a digital marketing company takes a lot of effort, skill, and knowledge on the part of the team working on boosting the brand’s reach online. When it comes to an SEO company Sri Lanka, the team will be required to have an understanding of the fundamentals of JavaScript.

What is JavaScript?

You may be familiar with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but may not know what they are. These are the three major components that go into creating a web page. HTML or Hypertext Mark-up Language is the structure of the website and organizes the content on a site. CSS deals with the design and presentation. JavaScript is focused on interactivity and there are frameworks and techniques related to JavaScript that are interesting and important to know about. However, since the focus is on the need for a SEO company Sri Lanka to know about the fundamentals of JavaScript, it’s vital to focus on what’s known as DOM.

Document Object Model

A big part of digital marketing services is based on knowing what search engines like Google use to analyse the content of a webpage. The Document Object Model or DOM is what you can find under “inspect element” on any page and is used by search engines to analyse the content of a page.

The browser first receives the HTML document of the webpage. It then analyses the content within this document, looking for additional resources like CSS, JavaScript files, and images. During this analysis of information, DOM is formed.

While an understanding of DOM is necessary for any digital marketing agency, it’s also important to go back to JavaScript and see what issues it may pose to SEO.

Crawlability

This is the first of three main reasons why JavaScript plays a huge role in digital marketing services. Crawlability is the ability for bots to crawl a website. This could lead to the blocking of search engines from your JavaScript.

When search engines can’t crawl a site’s JavaScript, they won’t be seeing the same webpage that users see. This in turn can reduce a website’s appeal to a search engine, which in turn affects SEO.

Obtainability

This is a bot’s ability to access information and analyse the website content. If a user’s interaction is required for content to be accessible, the search engine may not see it. When analysing the content of a webpage, the search engine won’t be clicking or scrolling and will not interact with a website the way a user would.

Added to this, the time it takes for a JavaScript load event also plays a role in what the search engine sees in a webpage. Errors within the JavaScript can also play a role here.

Site latency

Speed is an important factor considered by the search engine. After all, a search engine wouldn’t want to have pages that are slow to load at the top of the search results. No user would want a page that is slow to load either.

When a browser receives an HTML document and creates the DOM, most resources load as they appear in the document. If you have a heavy file at the top of the HTML document, the browser will load it first. This could result in perceived latency where the JavaScript is blocking the potential of the page to appear as if it’s loading faster.

Understanding these fundamentals of JavaScript will help any digital marketing company or SEO company Sri Lanka make a website’s content more accessible to the search engine. This in turn will boost SEO and increase page visits. This is why it is always best to choose a digital marketing agency that has the necessary tools, knowledge, and experience to execute a digital marketing strategy.