Implementing SEO for a Zend Framework/PHP/Angular.js application

Question

A team has implemented a web application using MySql, PHP with the Zend framework and Angular.js on the client side. I am in charge of implementing the SEO for this application.

I understand I have to take HTML snapshots of the Angular pages and serve them to web crawlers. That's the only solution working for search engines not executing Javascript.

1. How can I take such snapshots efficiently? I mean, is there a PHP-related tool that can help me? Should I call a tool from PHP? If yes, which one?

2. Had this application been developed with node.js, I might have used something like Grunt's grunt-html-snapshot. Is there an equivalent for the Zend framework?

3. Would you recommend I take snapshots once for all, or should I generate them dynamically? The content of the website does not change that often. It is not critical to have the latest content for SEO purposes.

Answer 1

Totally depends on your application. I've seen a few commercial solutions:

https://prerender.io middleware, which works with Zend Framework2. It's free for under 250 "pages" and works if 7-day caching is acceptable.

Also, check out Brombone.

If you want to go manual, you'll need to do a few things (details here):

• Set up hashbang (#!) syntax and HTML5 mode with $location service
• Add <meta name="fragment" content="!"> to your html header, which tells Google (and others) to crawl the site using the ?_escaped_fragment_= tag
• You can then parse the escaped fragment on the backend to serve some sort of static rendering