we are planning to build a BAP website for our customer. The website will have a page with a form-engine, where the user has the possibility to fill out a form (without logging in), as well as a customer-area which can be accessed after a login.
Furthermore, there will be a lot of static pages (~25, “About us”, “Imprint”, …). The content of these pages will more or less be the content of the customers current website. The current website ranks very high in Google and it is indispensable that the new BAP based website does as well.
Therefore my questions:
Does anybody have experience with Search engine optimisation regarding BAP applications? Are there projects out there that did something like that already?
Are there any recommendations or even best practice guidelines from the A12 team?
Look into the Schema directory, which seo attributes you need:
Every single page of the customer must be available via URL but not the ‘#’ variant. Title and meta-Tags should be set correctly for each page e.g. keywords.
And basic SEO is also important e.g. dont use more than one h1 Tag etc.
Most important: retain the authority of the incoming backlinks. So ideally, you’ll keep the existing URLs so that any incoming backlinks remain valid. Alternatively, you could set 301 (permanent!) redirects to the corresponding new URLs but I think this can take away some “link juice”.
You’ll also need a custom solution to allow access to the form engine without login. Perhaps the concept of “anonymous access” in A12 can come in handy.
Make sure your new site runs either canonically on www or non-www but not both. That would make every page duplicate content.
Thanks for your input!
Keeping the existing URLs shouldn’t be a problem, luckily we already followed the guide introduced in the thread you mentioned and implemented custom routing for the application!
My biggest concern is how the Login page might be handled. We currently have a custom solution for a technical login. The anonymous access comes with UAA, right?
My knowledge might be outdated, but I think, that your biggest concern should be the crawlability in general. In a Single Page Application your content will be loaded asynchronously, if you are not using server-side rendering or some pre-rendering logic, and the search engine crawlers will not wait for your initial server requests and javascript scripts to finish. (At least they have a lot of issues with it.)
