One page with multiple sections - unique URL for each section

[jaspercurry]

Hi All,

This is my first time posting to the Moz community, so forgive me if I make any silly mistakes.

A little background: I run a website that for a company that makes custom parts out of specialty materials. One of my strategies is to make high quality content about all areas of these specialty materials to attract potential customers - pretty strait-forward stuff.

I have always struggled with how to structure my content; from a usability point of view, I like just having one page for each material, with different subsections covering covering different topical areas. Example: for a special metal material I would have one page with subsections about the mechanical properties, thermal properties, available types, common applications, etc. Basically how Wikipedia organizes its content. I do not have a large amount of content for each section, but as a whole it makes one nice cohesive page for each material.

I do use H tags to show the specific sections on the page, but I am wondering if it may be better to have one page dedicated to the specific material properties, one page dedicated to specific applications, and one page dedicated to available types.

What are the communities thoughts on this? As a user of the website, I would rather have all of the information on a single, well organized page for each material. But what do SEO best practices have to say about this?

My last thought would be to create a hybrid website (I don't know the proper term). Have a look at these examples from Time and Quartz. When you are viewing a article, the URL is unique to that page. However, when you scroll to the bottom of the article, you can keep on scrolling into the next article, with a new unique URL - all without clicking through to another page.

I could see this technique being ideal for a good web experience while still allowing me to optimize my content for more specific topics/keywords. If I used this technique with the Canonical tag would I then get the best of both worlds?

Let me know your thoughts! Thank you for the help!

[OlegKorneitchouk]

"I am wondering if it may be better to have one page dedicated to the specific material properties, one page dedicated to specific applications, and one page dedicated to available types. "

^ this. Create a page targeting each type of customer (one looking for a specific material, one looking for a specific application and one for available types). You can use similar content with some quoted content blocks on each page, just make sure there is unique content there as well that tailors the content searching for a specific need.

[lautman]

Agreed with Oleg.   On the Time and Quartz pages you are essentially looking at their blog index.  Their CMS (content management system) does some fancy footwork to show the url of the post you happen to be looking at.  It isn't one page with a different URL for each section.

If you are using a CMS like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla, you can create content (posts) for the material, applications and types, and then list them on pages for the customer type.  If not, you can simply make pages like Oleg suggested.