SEO in Next.js
Tags: seo, nextjs, ssr, react
Published: 2023-02-05 07:30:53

Next.js is a framework for building server-rendered React applications, and that one of the benefits of using a framework like Next.js is that it makes it easy to optimize your application for search engines.

One of the key ways to optimize a Next.js application for SEO is to ensure that all of your content is properly rendered on the server, rather than relying on client-side JavaScript to populate the content. This is because search engines generally have a hard time indexing content that is generated dynamically on the client side.
Another important factor to consider is the structure of your URLs. Next.js uses a file-based routing system, which makes it easy to create clean and SEO-friendly URLs for your pages.

Additionally, you can also use next-seo which is a library that allows you to easily add SEO-related meta tags to your pages, such as the title and description tags, which are used by search engines to understand the content of your page.


You can also consider using server-side rendering to create an HTML snapshot of your pages as well as dynamic rendering to make sure search engine crawlers can access your javascript-based pages.

Next.js provides a lot of built-in features and tools that make it easy to create SEO-friendly React applications.

One of many reasons to use Next.js is improved SEO for your react application and an important part of this is the numerous SEO meta tags. While adding these tags is already supported by the framework, the process can be made even easier by using next-SEO. In this post, we will compare the approach with and without the next SEO.
next-seo is a popular library that allows developers to easily add SEO-related meta tags to their Next.js applications. These tags, such as the title and description tags are used by search engines to understand the content of a page and display it in search results.

next-seo provides a set of React components that can be used to add meta tags to your pages. For example, you can use the <SEO> component to set the title and description tags for your pages, and the <OpenGraph> component to set tags for social media sharing.

next-seo also allows you to define your SEO tags globally as well as dynamically on a page-by-page basis. This allows you to set default tags for your site, and then override them on specific pages as needed.

If you want to use next-seo, you need to install it first, then you can import it into your pages and use it as a component, you can also pass as a prop to it the required meta tags you want to add.

To install **next-seo**, you can use npm or yarn by running the following command:

```
npm install next-seo

```
or 

```
yarn add next-seo

```
Once next-seo is installed, you can import the library and its components into your pages and start using them.

here’s an example of how you might use next-seo to add meta tags to a Next.js page:

```
import Head from 'next/head'
import {SEO, OpenGraph} from 'next-seo'

const Home = () => {
    return (
        <div>
            <Head>
                <title>My Next.js App</title>
            </Head>
            <SEO
                title="My Next.js App"
                description="This is my Next.js app, it's awesome!"
                openGraph={{
                    title: 'My Next.js App',
                    description: 'This is my Next.js app, it\'s awesome!',
                    url: 'https://mynextjsapp.com',
                    images: [
                        {
                            url: 'https://mynextjsapp.com/og-image.jpg',
                            alt: 'My Next.js App',
                        },
                    ],
                    site_name: 'My Next.js App',
                }}
            />
            <OpenGraph
                type='website'
                locale='en_IE'
                url='https://mynextjsapp.com'
                title='My Next.js App'
                description='This is my Next.js app, it\'s awesome!'
                site_name='My Next.js App'
            />
            <p>Welcome to my Next.js app!</p>
        </div>
    )
}

export default Home
```

In this example, we’re using the <SEO> and <OpenGraph> components to set the title and description tags, as well as some OpenGraph tags for social media sharing. The title tag is set in the Head the component as well, which is the standard way of adding meta tags in Next.js.

You can see that we pass the title, description, url, images, site_name to the SEO component and for OpenGraph component we pass type, locale, url, title, description, site_name.

We also use OpenGraph component to set additional open graph tags like type, locale, url, title, description, site_name

It is worth noting that you should always check that the tags are rendered correctly in the HTML source code of the page and that they match the expected values.

You can also use this library to add other meta tags such as meta, twitter, jsonld and more.

We saw how next-SEO helps to make SEO tags easier to work with by providing a more readable approach, less typing required, and some smart capabilities like avoiding duplicated tags and title templates.

Next Seo [GitHub](https://github.com/garmeeh/next-seo) Repository