it is really embarrassing, but right now my galaxy-hosted meteor-app does NOT even rank within google’s top100 for it’s main name. Yes, I have H1-headers, meta-tags and use the seo-packages mentioned in the guide.
Imagine how trustworthy “salesforce” would be, if it would NOT rank top1 in google when entering “salesforce” into google’s input.
So far I have NOT done any seo stuff, except adding the meteor seo-packages mentioned in the guide. There are NO backlinks, etc.
I am NO seo-expert, but right now I feel like I might have more luck with hosting my homepage/blog/landing-pages in WORDPRESS and the app itself on galaxy.
Does anyone have some experience if this is worth it?
I guess that I should talk to some seo-agencies around and ask them what they recon.
Just hoping that someone might have gone thru this and has some tips…
There are couple of things you can try before going to Wordpress:
Go to Google’s webmaster tools and add you website there. Then try to fetch as google bot. If you get a blank page you might want to go back to older version of prerender as described in MDG’s blog post. If neither helps then there is also SSR, but adding Wordpress is also recomended at this point.
What most people do is that they configure their main domain to go to Worpress which acts as a marketing page. Then the Meteor app is run on the app subdomain. So www.myproject.com goes to the Wordpress hosting while app.myproject.com goes to Galaxy.
I wouldn’t use Wordpress just for SEO. In my opinion a CMS like WP only makes sense, if you really need a CMS because you have so many pages and all that. Besides you have a huge overhead because of PHP behind it, you gonna need a cache to make it perform, and so on.
I personally only use WP for customer pages - my own landing page of my meteor app is built with Brunch.io - after some configuration this works really well and since it’s just static html in the end, it’s fast as hell!
besides that: imho SEO usually is just trying to figure out a blackbox. Just make your site fast, load properly on every device, check that you’ve got a proper HTML markup (e.h. no h2 before a h1) and you are pretty much set. All my pages always performed best if I didn’t think about SEO too much and just provide proper content in a meaningful and quick way.
We have done a lot of work with Meteor. I have tried to search 2 of our work on Google - http://www.cityhive.co.uk & http://mygyde.org and I was able to find them successfully.
We also do Digital Marketing including SEO. If you can share your site URL - we can check it. We might need server access details later which you can provide us privately.
Regards,
Sanjay Kumar
Deligence Technologies - your growing technology partner Meteor Prime Partner
Hmm well … I don’t think there is contact-form plugin or anything like that. You gotta understand, that in the end you end of with static html files. nothing more. So you don’t have anything on the server like PHP which can send emails --> you have to use JS libs for that to send the mails via a third party service.
sitemap.xml: I would start of with the brunch.io skeleton using handlebars: brunch-with-cocktails
I am pretty sure you can use handlebars somehow to also have a route for a sitemap.xml but I am not sure. it really depends on the number of (sub-) pages you have - using something like brunch.io only makes sense if you don’t have too many pages as I’ve said already. And in that case, you can just write the sitemap.xml yourself - maybe the easiest way by far. If you have so many pages that you have to generate the sitemap programmatically … then something like Wordpress makes perfect sense again!
Playing around with brunch.io and it looks like a quick drop-in solution. Actually the contact-form could stay within the meteor-app - I’ll just link to app.domain.com/contact.
The remaining question is, if Wordpress makes more sense SEO-wise than brunch.io, but I guess that we can NOT answer that, right? All I know is that google LOVES Wordpress, due to its well known plugins, p.e. the yast seo-stuff. Plus my gut feeling tells me to go away from galaxy (and meteors ssr) for landing-pages. In the end it is super important to be found.
I need to have some results in 6-8 weeks, so I need to start acting and stop thinking…
Any more thoughts on this? Thanks for your help so far!!
NOTE that the app is hosted on GALAXY with enabled prerender.io.
Doing a search for my app name on google with “site:domain.com” acutally gives me 2 sites which are indexed with the correct names.
Going to “fetch as google bot” gives me BLANK pages, when NOT entering ?_escaped_fragment_= as parameter. When entering the param “?escaped_fragment=” I see the correct page. I don’t know where I got that ?_escaped_fragment_= from, I think from meteor guide
@storyteller With this info: Do you recon to spend my time on creating backlinks and other seo stuff, and NOT on wordpress or brunch.io?
It depends, if you have stuff in your app that needs SEO as well (ie. is public facing and needs discoverability, or will get links from social media), then I would put an effort into getting prerender working (check this blog post, you might want to switch to the old version of prerender which I think works a bit better right now for Meteor apps). If your app is pretty much all private stuff and you need to get it quickly on then go with what is the easiest for you.
Google is pretty good at crawling dynamic sites like Meteor apps. your problem is you have no links to your website. write informational blog posts, get a facebook and twitter and post stuff linking back to your website, you need quality content on your topic that links to your domain. i was able to get my company’s website from not even showing up in google to being #1 suggestion when typing in our company name within only two weeks of putting effort into it. it also helps to have a unique and distinct company name
Hi guys, thanks a lot for helping out. I decided to keep my standard meteor-installation (hosted on galaxy) and spend my time on doing some content- and backlink-creation.
Let’s see how things go…
Yeah - I should have thought about the uniqueness of the company-name a (very) bit earlier! There are no other companies using it, but it is a common term used in a totally different context.
Check out my solution for pre-rendered landing pages with embedded “above-the-fold” CSS for blazing fast landing pages and good SEO.
However, Wordpress/CMS landing pages can be useful if you have other, non-coders, on your team who need to update the sales site without re-deploying the app…
