API to power all websites

[recbrands]

I spoke to one of my lead web developers and we are planning on powering all of our desktop, mobile and tablet sites with our new API.  Everything will be populated through javascript and is cloud-based rather than through actual HTML.  How do we incorporate all of our SEO?

[matbennett]

If you aren't going to have any HTML output, you are won't really have any SEO to speak of to be honest.

There is no issue with using a single API to power multiple front ends. However you should be aiming for indexable HTML output in all cases.  The phrase "cloud-based rather than through actual HTML" doesn't really make sense.  If that came from the developers then you should be hearing alarm bells.

If organic search is part of your strategy going forward, then you really need to clarify some things before going any further.  Most importantly you need to be confident that the output will be readable, indexable and crawlable by search engines.

You also need to be confident that your developers understand these issues and the importance of on site SEO. (if they don't it may well be cheaper to find new ones that try to "fix it in post").

What you have said above worries me to be honest.

[GeorgeAndrews]

Mat's right. Your content does need to be readable, indexable, and crawlable.

It sounds the resulting content will still be HTML output of some sort; however, you are stating that you won't have access to any actual static HTML files for SEO purposes.

If this is the case, the backend needs to be extensible enough to allow you to still do your job as an SEO. If you can't provide unique Page Titles, descriptions, canonical link elements, etc..., your organic search results will suffer.

Here's another issue: if your pages are built with JavaScript, you need to make sure the output is readable by search engines. I've seen issues with JavaScript-built pages before where search engines are indexing "blank" pages, indexing the wrong pages, or seeing duplicate content where AJAX is used to inject the unique content after the page is ready and has already been crawled.