Myths About MEAN Stack Websites Not Being SEO-Friendly

MEAN Stack is a collection of technologies based on JavaScript used for the purpose of developing websites and web-based applications. It is an excellent option to create robust and fast applications in the industry that is surrounded by cut-throat competition.

In the past few years, MEAN stack has become a feasible alternative to create high-performance and dynamic websites and applications. It has garnered the interest of many technology firms that have invested in the JavaScript domain. This is because it offers a myriad of advantages, including lower utilization of human resources, cost-reduction, seamless operation, re-usability of software components, and more.

Despite the benefits, there is some confusion among people regarding whether to choose MEAN Stack for their websites. Read on to learn what this concern is all about.

Misconceptions About MEAN Stack Development & SEO

I often get clients who are skeptical about MEAN stack development services because of the widespread belief that the result is not SEO-friendly. They are of the opinion that although the technology helps to create user-friendly and robust websites, it is difficult to get the site recognized by search engines such as Google, and even more challenging to get it ranked in the Search Engine Result Pages.

To understand why people believe it is difficult to integrate SEO practices with a MEAN website, it is essential to get acquainted with its architecture.

MEAN Stack Components & Architecture

The different elements of Mean Stack Architecture and their primary function are as follows:

Angular JS – Accepts requests from the users and displays results
NodeJS – Manages the Client and Server Requests
Express JS – Makes requests to the Database and returns the responses
MongoDB – Stores the data and retrieves it whenever required

Problems with JavaScript & SEO

Since MEAN stack has a JavaScript framework, the pages we want indexing are rendered in JS, making the entire process of SEO a little challenging. This is because although the site looks great and runs fast, search engines such as Google still won’t be able to crawl the content. To put it clearly, for a search engine to understand MEAN websites, they have to render or execute JavaScript.

In addition to this, there are no specific general JS coding guidelines that can be used to create websites and applications.

To summarize:

Crawl, Index, Rank – 3 Problems in MEAN Stack SEO

So, Is SEO Possible for MEAN Websites?

After hearing about such challenges that surround MEAN stack development, many people think that it could kill their SEO.

However, I believe that such notions are the result of a lack of clarity and understanding on the part of the users. It helps to remember that part of digital life is to work with what you have. And what you have in the form of a MEAN website is already loved by the end-users. Thus, it is only wise that we take a better approach that yields excellent results, making the entire process of SEO a worthy investment.

To put it simply, the approach to SEO for a MEAN website is a little different than HTML-based bites. However, SEO professionals have to think outside the box to come up with ways that can help search engines understand JavaScript. Although it requires a different approach to be taken, the task is not as impossible or difficult as it may seem at first glance. To answer the question, yes, SEO can be implemented for MEAN websites.

TOPS Offers Excellent MEAN Stack Development Services

TOPS Infosolutions is a leading MEAN Stack development company offering reliable and prompt services. We have tech expertise and skills to help you create a website or application according to your requirements.

All you need to do is get in touch with us to discuss your project, so we can determine what needs to be done.

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How Can MEAN Stack Development Help Your Business?

Building Modern and Scalable Enterprise Apps with MEAN Stack

Why You Should Use MEAN stack for Real-time App Development?

MEAN stack lets you create real-time websites with push capability and give developers a tool for working in the non-blocking, event-driven I/O paradigm. Node.js shines in real-time web applications by employing push technology over web sockets.

Before MEAN came in, the web was living in a stateless request-response paradigm. MEAN stack brought us real-time web applications with two-way connections, where both the client and server can initiate communication, allowing them to exchange data freely.

This paradigm is quite revolutionary considering traditionally only client used to initiate communication.

As a result, MEAN forms the technology stack of various big enterprises.

It remains lightweight, efficient in the face of data-intensive real-time applications

MEAN stack certainly shines in building fast, scalable network applications, as it’s capable of handling a huge number of simultaneous connections with high throughput, which equates to high scalability. Unlike traditional web-serving techniques where each connection (request) spawns a new thread, taking up system RAM and eventually maxing-out at the amount of RAM available, MEAN stack development operates on a single-thread, using non-blocking I/O calls, allowing it to support tens of thousands of concurrent connections held in the event loop.

Suppose we are developing a real-time chat app. It uses traditional web-serving techniques and, consequently, for each new conversation, the program creates a new thread. Let’s say each thread occupies 2MB of RAM and the system has 8GB of RAM installed. The RAM will max out at 4000 concurrent conversations. If you have managed chat support center, then you know 4000 conversations at a time aren’t surprising.

In contrast, a MEAN stack based rea-time chat app can virtually, achieve scalability levels of over 1M concurrent conversation on a single thread in the same amount of RAM. Of course, even the largest of support centers don’t process this many requests at a time.

It is used in production by large companies

Companies such as PayPal, Uber, Netflix Walmart, Yahoo, etc. rely on MEAN stack development for a large chunk of their application portfolio. In fact, at PayPal, they rebuilt one of their Java and Spring based applications using Node and it found that the node application was built:

Twice as fast with fewer people
33% fewer lines of code
40% fewer files
2x requests/second
35% faster response time

It has non-blocking or asynchronous nature

Imagine you go to a restaurant and a waiter comes to your table to take your order and gives it to the kitchen. Then he moves on to serve another table while the chef is preparing your meal and thus can serve many different tables. Diners don’t have to wait for the chef to cook one meal before they serve another table. This is what we call non-blocking or asynchronous architecture.

This is how node applications work: the waiter is like a thread allocated to handle a request. A single thread is used to handle multiple requests.

In contrast to non-blocking or asynchronous architecture, we have blocking or synchronous architecture. Imagine you go to another restaurant, and in this restaurant, a waiter is allocated to you. They take your order and give it to the kitchen now they are sitting in the kitchen waiting for the chef to prepare your meal. At this time, the waiter is not doing anything else. He is not going to take an order from another table until your meal is ready. This is what we call blocking or synchronous architecture and that’s how applications built with frameworks like asp.net or Rails work out of the box.

In Rail, when we receive a request on the server, a thread is allocated to handle that request. As a part of handling that requests, it is likely that we’re going to query a database and sometimes it may take a little while until the result is ready.

When the database is executing the query that thread is sitting there waiting; it can’t be used to serve another client and we need a new thread to serve another client.

It can serve thousands of concurrent clients

In case of real time applications, we have a large number of concurrent clients. At some point, we’re going to runout of threads to serve these clients and new clients have to wait until new threads are available.

With this kind of architecture, we are not utilizing our resources efficiently. This is the problem with blocking or synchronous architecture and that shows applications built with frameworks like asp.net can’t work in real-time due to their blocking nature.

Therefore, MEAN stack development is a natural choice while developing real-time applications due to its non-blocking nature. The application has a single thread to handle all requests when a request arrives, that single thread is used to handle that request.

If we need to query a database, our thread doesn’t have to wait for the database to return the data. While the database is executing our query, that thread will be used to serve another client. When the database prepares the result, it puts a message in what we call an event queue.

Node is continuously monitoring this queue in the background when it finds an event in this queue, it will take it out and process it. This kind of architecture makes MEAN stack ideal for building applications that include a lot of disk or network access.

We can serve more clients without the need to throw in more hardware and that’s why MEAN applications are highly scalable.

It has the best database to store JSON documents

MongoDB lets you develop faster, deploy easier and scale bigger. Real-time applications are more networked, social and interactive than ever. This is driving new requirements to support Big Data, fast feature development and flexible deployment strategies.

Real-time applications require storing more and more data and, more so over, accessing it at higher and higher rates. If your database runs on a single server you will reach a scaling limit. MongoDB scales by adding more servers; you can add more capacity whenever you want.

Modeling data as documents is simpler and allows schemas to evolve effortlessly without duplication. MongoDB works with commodity servers and elastic virtualized environments, saving you money and headaches.

It is not a bloated framework

MEAN stack does not come with the bells and whistles of a full stack framework. You can’t compare MEAN to Python Django, Python flask or Ruby on Rails. It’s a web-server technology that you can then use a bunch of different frameworks that exist. If you don’t need that stuff and you just want a bare-bones Web API, Node.js has been around a little bit longer and has a larger community. If you are not comfortable with bare-bones web APIs, you can go for Express.js, which is again a part of MEAN stack.

Depending on how slim you need your server-side API of you real-time applications to be, MEAN can be as slim as you need it to be.

The future is lean; we don’t want bloated full stack frameworks because bloated full stack frameworks are slow and they’re not built with the modern-day client-side library unlike MEAN. You need your server to be lean and efficient and it needs to be serving JSON data. So that these newer client-side libraries can then take it and build your UI from it.

It’s the Future

JavaScript, now on the front, is handling routing and everything else. You need a lean MEAN server-side setup and the best option out there if I compare it to some of these other stacks that have been around the block for quite some time. Ruby on Rails is way too bloated compared to a server-side language and it’s blocking type.

The future of web development I think rests more with MEAN stack and it does with any of the other older technology stacks like LAMP.

How Will MEAN Stack Development Add Value to Your Business?

MEAN stack garners interest of many technology firms that have existing investment into JavaScript realm whether in the form of software infrastructure or human resources. In addition, SMEs, in various industry verticals with little to no investment in web technologies, are looking at MEAN stack as the web development stack to replace their existing, hard-to-maintain apps in LAMP stack. After all, MEAN stack is everything businesses have been asking in a development stack. Isomorphic coding makes way for seamless interoperability between the two ends, lower utilization of human resources, re-usability of software components, cost-reduction and rapid cloud deployment of business apps.

Further, MEAN Stack is JavaScript, front and backend, which means a JavaScript developer can switch between client and server side of a business application without much fuss. No doubt, many businesses are looking at MEAN Stack development to build fresh business apps or replace existing ones. It brings a number of business benefits.

It Leverages on Existing Resources and Infrastructure

As JavaScript isn’t an entirely new language like Swift and Kotlin, chances are your organization will have an existing pool of JavaScript developers on whom you can leverage on. Most of the web developers are JavaScript developers by default. Even if you have to hire fresh resource, hiring web developers is easier than hiring .NET, PHP, or Java developers. They, also, cost lesser.

Since MEAN Stack is JavaScript at both the ends, a developer can easily switch between frontend and backend part of the development for a greater integration amidst the software sides. With no assigned roles, developers will work towards project completion rather than fulfilling their roles.

MEAN Stack is amalgamation of cross-platform technologies: MongoDB, Express.js, Angular, and Node.js and is thus cross-platform itself. The resulting code is platform independent. You don’t need specific hardware to run it and your existing IT infrastructure will work quite fine.

All in all, developing in MEAN stack doesn’t require you to make any additional investment. In most cases, your existing resources and infrastructure will do just fine.

It will Deliver the Ultimate User Experience

In MEAN stack app development, same set of developers develop frontend and backend. While in traditional web development where everything from frontend to database needs separate development teams to collaborate at various level. This often leaves too many gaps to fill at the end of each development cycle.

When the same developers create both side of the web application, those sides can communicate better; making way for tighter integration between the client and server side, which directly translates to top-notch user experience without too many caveats.

MEAN stack indeed adds value to your business by allowing you to develop advance business applications, which were previously were too complicated to implement or, even, impossible.

MEAN Stack Apps take Faster Time to Market

Web applications developed in MEAN stack have codebase written entirely in JavaScript. In fact, the isomorphic code functionality lets developer use the same set of JavaScript code between the components of MEAN stack. A function written for Node.js can very well be pasted into Express.js with little or no changes for the same results.

As the same team handles every part of the development from server configurations to database utilization, resulting business apps are well integrated between the software components. Even when there are voids between the components, any person of the development team, to save time, can fill it without having to collaborate with a member of other team. The same goes when developers are debugging the application before the first build.

Since the development can monitored closely in case of MEAN application, the resulting business apps tend to take far less time to market, which is exactly what businesses are looking for nowadays.

They are Easy to Maintain and Add Features to

Ask any scrum master, web development, with so many technologies involved, is a hard nut to crack when going all-out agile. Your MVP might take forever to reach the hands of your users and when it does, it might not deliver the business value you expected. At this point, businesses either abandon the app altogether or end up with weird user stories tied to strange personas, which give birth to unwanted features that your users will seldom use.

When such distorted business apps enter the market, they are costly to maintain as businesses have to keep subset of all the teams involved in the development during its lifetime in order to keep it usable or when adding unwanted features.

Applications developed in MEAN Stack addresses many complications associated with traditional web technologies by bringing every part of development into JavaScript realm. Since a single JavaScript developer can maintain your app, you don’t have to run whole lot of maintenance teams and, thus, you can maintain your business apps at the fraction of cost.

When adding new features, you just have to bring a few more JavaScript developers, which again need less resources than traditional web development. In traditional web apps to add new features, developers from various technology teams have to collaborate at various level that delays updates to your business apps.

MEAN Stack = High Performance Business Applications

In today’s date and time, businesses want their apps as high performing as any other consumer-centric app in the market. SMEs are already making strides into the world of PWAs, which are as good as mobile apps when running in a web browser environment.

For businesses looking to develop web apps that look and feel like mobile apps, MEAN is the best solution. Unlike traditional web technologies, MEAN utilizes single-page applications (SPAs).

PWAs built in MEAN stack work offline and don’t have to be constantly updated for each server request. When needed to be update; PWAs, in real-time, only update a part of the UI rather than the entire webpage unlike traditional web apps that reload after each click or tap.

Resulting real-time applications are turning out to be the gold standard of web development in the business world.

Final Thoughts

With so many benefits MEAN stack and JavaScript bring, including the cost benefits, it’s high time businesses must adopt to these gold standards of web development if they are looking for highest performance to cost ratio. Not to mention, they can finally replace their legacy web apps with those coded in JavaScript under MEAN stack. They can do so without the need of additional resources and investment in IT infrastructure.

Even if they don’t have the infrastructure in place, MEAN stack apps are easy to deploy on cloud. For additional resources, they always hire a cloud team to collaborate with their in house team.

For example, TOPS has a team of 30+ MEAN stack developers, who are ready to collaborate with you in any existing or new MEAN stack project, business apps or consumer apps.

Blog Tag: MEAN Stack Development Services