Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving the ranking of a website on search engines. The higher the ranking, the more likely people are to find the website.
There are many factors that contribute to a website's ranking, including the quality of the content, the structure of the website, and the way the website is coded.
In this post, we will focus on how to code a website using Spring Boot and Spring MVC that is friendly to search engines.
Spring Boot is a framework that makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring-based applications.
Spring Boot includes a number of features that make it easy to create and run a web application, including:
Spring MVC is a framework for building web applications. It is built on top of the Spring framework and provides a unified approach to web application development.
Spring MVC includes a number of features that make it easy to develop web applications, including:
We will use the Spring Initializr to create a Spring Boot web application.
Go to the Spring Initializr website (https://start.spring.io/) and fill in the form to create a new project.
Select the following options:
Click "Generate Project" to download the project.
Import the project into Eclipse as a Gradle project.
Controllers are the heart of a Spring MVC application. They are responsible for handling requests and responses.
In our example, we will create a controller that handles requests to the "/" URL.
Create a new class in the com.example.demo package and name it "HelloController.java".
Add the following code to the class:
package com.example.demo;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ResponseBody;
@Controller
public class HelloController {
@RequestMapping("/")
@ResponseBody
public String index() {
return "Hello, world!";
}
}
The @Controller
annotation marks the class as a controller.
The @RequestMapping
annotation maps requests to the "/" URL to the index() method.
The @ResponseBody
annotation indicates that the string returned by the index() method should be the body of the response.
In a Spring MVC application, views are typically template files that are processed by a template engine.
In our example, we will use the Thymeleaf template engine to process a HTML template file.
Create a new directory in the src/main/resources directory and name it "templates".
Create a new file in the templates directory and name it "index.html".
Add the following code to the file:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Hello, world!</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello, world!</p>
</body>
</html>
Spring Boot applications are typically configured using properties files.
In our example, we will use a properties file to configure the Thymeleaf template engine.
Create a new file in the src/main/resources directory and name it "application.properties".
Add the following code to the file:
spring.thymeleaf.prefix=classpath:/templates/
spring.thymeleaf.suffix=.html
spring.thymeleaf.mode=HTML5
spring.thymeleaf.encoding=UTF-8
spring.thymeleaf.content-type=text/html
spring.thymeleaf.cache=false
We can run the application from the command line or from Eclipse.
To run the application from the command line, go to the project directory and type the following command:
./gradlew bootRun
To run the application from Eclipse, right-click on the project and select "Run As -> Spring Boot App".
We can test the application by sending a request to the "/" URL.
To test the application from the command line, we can use the curl command.
curl http://localhost:8080/
To test the application from Eclipse, we can use the built-in browser.
Right-click on the HelloController.java file and select "Run As -> Spring Boot App".
The application will be started and the "/" URL will be opened in the browser.
In this post, we have seen how to create a search engine optimization (SEO) friendly website using Spring Boot and Spring MVC.
We have seen how to create a controller that handles requests and responses, and how to create a view that is processed by a template engine.
We have also seen how to configure the application using properties files.