Site as one page - SEO implications

[AdamWormann]

We may be inheriting a site and will be asked to do SEO for it.  We will have control over the development of the site, so this structure is what it is.  My question is - how significant of an impact do you think this is going to have and can you think of any workarounds that may help?

Basically, the user experience of the site will feel similar to multiple pages.  However, this site will, in essence be one page and pull various content through javascript from different locations.  I have not seen the site yet (and believe it is still in development), but this is how it has been explained to me.  Any thoughts?

My first thought was to add a blog to add page depth to the site and expand the content.  Any other thoughts are welcome and appreciated.  Thanks.

(I know this is limited information, I'm sorry.  It's just about all I have to work with right now, and I was a little concerned and was hoping for a second opinion)

[Schwaab]

With only one landing page you can really only target a couple keywords.  I think you should definitely focus on building out landing pages for the content, rather than having it all display at one URL.  Without landing pages you really can't target a variety of keywords.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Adam

There are a lot of these one page sites around at the moment - I guess they are kind of cool! I am too old to get cool but... we have to work with what we have eh.

Well, I have seen a few ways these sites can work and Google handling them in different ways so let me give you my take.

1. This kind of approach is not ideal
2. You have to get everything else right
3. You are losing out on some of the SEO easy wins

It's pretty much impossible to comment in detail without a link but here is some food for thought:

• No page titles
• No meta descriptions
• No breadcrumbs
• No page names / directories

So, you are losing much of what gives a site it's shape and context.

Now, Google do have a go at this and they seem to be indexing page anchors for many of these pages so we need to ensure each section has really well structured code so we are working with what we do have.

• H1 tags
• Text Navigation
• Copy / images etc

You are likely looking at something that works something like this:
http://uat.itrelateservices.com/

Matt Cutts did a webmaster video on this a while back which is worth a watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mibrj2bOFCU

The answer, as ever is it depends. You need to see the site, talk to the developers and ideally crawl it to see what it looks like. Google will do their best but the results may not be optimal.

Pretty vague answer but I hope that helps in some way!

Marcus

[Schwaab]

Do a site:examplesite.com to see if Google is able to identify individual sections of content on the site.  If not, you need to create pages to have something to work with.

[Jonathan1979]

Unfortunately, to successfully do decent SEO on a one-page site you will need to make alternate landing pages for the keywords you are targeting as you will only be able to really target a couple of keywords on that page.

This has a number of benefits, as you can usually put more information on the site that you cannot fit onto the "one-page" homepage.  I have successfully done this on a "one page" parrallax site, and even linked back from the front page content to the keyword pages.

On a negative side, the whole point of the "one-page" is to wow the user and maximise conversion.  If 90% of your search traffic bypasses that page... well it may well defeat the purpose of it to an extent, and you may want to consider an alternative.

[stevecounsell]

So that video from Matt Cutts really just says the 1 page solution isn't optimal. At least that's my interpretation.

Google is having trouble keeping up with the new design paradigm of single page with dynamic content reveal using css and javascript.

Still too much reliance on meta title and URL keyword inclusions rather than ranking the content of a site and working out the relevance and usefulness for a particular search term.

[Dubs]

I'd suggest to create several landing pages that are optimized for particular keywords, this way each page has a real focus.

[AdamWormann]

Wow, thanks so much everyone.  Sorry, emails didn't come through indicating that there were responses or I would have gotten back sooner.

I do not have a URL yet - site is still in development by another agency.  The structure is pretty set, but I do want to be able to manage expectations.  We will work on creating a blog that we can use for additional pages (possibly part blog, part full pages to target keywords).

So, it looks like it's not going to kill us, but it's not going to do us any favors either.  thanks so much for your help.