SEO Considerations

[tbreuss]

I know this isn't an alphaTab topic per se, but I'll ask anyway ;-)

Has anyone here ever thought about optimising the sheet music generated by JavaScript for SEO?
And do you have any ideas or suggestions that would also work in a non-JS server environment, such as PHP?

For example, with the idea that generated sheet music could appear as SVG or another graphic format in Google & Co search results?

[Danielku15]

SEO is always a tricky thing to handle in the world of dynamic JavaScript stuff.

In terms of alphaTab the main music sheet is anyhow rather a graphical object and not really "search indexable". Beside the general song/file information there is not much "text" a robot could add to the search index.

Until some extend engines like Google will execute dynamic JavaScript and re-scan the updated DOM, but it has a lower search ranking. Having server-side generated HTML has generally a higher rank on indexing.

I guess the main question is what parts should be indexed and how do search engines support it. This also depends on how the "content" is presented (is it mainly an alphaTab player, some sort of lecture where alphaTab provides some interactive UI etc.) From a gut feeling the most important parts are:

• General Song / File Information should be server-rendered
• Semantic HTML tags and the right meta tags need to be used on the server.

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Looking more concrete to alphaTab it can help there in these ways:

1. Extracting Meta Data via Low Level APIs

• JavaScript: General Node.js can be used, or some frameworks might provide Server-Side Components (e.g. React SSR). Only the main AlphaTabApi object is browser dependent. Anything else can be used in a headless environment.
• .net: If you build a small .net app you could also use it to extract information in server environments. I haven't tried compiling .net self-contained or AOT apps with alphaTab but theoretically the core should be compatible too.
• Java: There is a plan to provide a standard Kotlin/JVM lib for the core which doesn't depend on Android
• Other platforms: I have some other new platforms on the radar but no specific plans until an alphaTab 2.0 is out. Mainly Python and Go are on my radar. PHP is rather not in my focus.

2. (Pre-)Rendering Files (limited)

• Rendering SVGs doesn't depend on the browser and can be done in server environments. Obviously this is no interactive editor and some manual plumbing for web fonts has to be done. But the SVGs could serve as initial content being sent before the client side component kicks in and re-renders stuff.
• For rendering PNGs you would need to use AlphaSkia to produce PNGs.
• Technically all UI things are implemented via the IUiFacade. Technically any custom UI layer (also headless-server) can be implemented as long as the environment allows some state management.

In all cases, you would likely to some sort of server-side caching in a database and on file system to avoid recomputing things on every page load.