Site as one page - SEO implications
-
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)
-
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.
-
I'd suggest to create several landing pages that are optimized for particular keywords, this way each page has a real focus.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
- This kind of approach is not ideal
- You have to get everything else right
- 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=Mibrj2bOFCUThe 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
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ecommerce web design read more toggle vs menu link on home page and product pages
Hello, We have an Ecommerce store. We have a lot of content on the home page and product pages and we are going back and forth between which one to use between a toggle "Read More" "Show Less" toggle for each section and a anchor linked menu. We have long product pages We're thinking a read more toggle is more appropriate for category descriptions so that they can go at the top of the category and not take up space. But the read more toggle with lots of content scrolls the page down and doesn't scroll it back up when you hit "show less" We're leaning towards a linked menu for the home pages and product pages for this reason, but an accordion type set of toggles would look nicer. What do you recommend, and how have you set up your read more toggles if they have lots of info so that they are not confusing? Are there other options? ' Not looking for code (I can do that) I'm looking for ideas on the cleanest home page, category pages, and product pages when they have tons and tons of textual content. Wanting to trim it up and make it look compact and neat! Thanks!
Web Design | | BobGW0 -
Flickr Gallery Effect on Page Ranking
Hello there We are working on a redesign for our site, and our business is very image intensive (sign company) On a typical product page, we have 5 images we are placing directly in the site optimized to try to rank the images in image search We also have about 30-50 sets of images, with 3-5 images each - hosted on flickr, that we are displaying as galleries on the page (user clicks, opens a light box to view the set, etc) Here is the page - http://impactsigns.ugmade.com/sample-page/ If you look at the page code, you will see that the flickr gallery (additional examples) section - adds ALOT of code to the page (lines 498 to 837) My question is : Does adding that flick gallery block negatively impact the page SEO, all else being equal? It seems like a lot of lines of code. And dont want it to seem spammy to the search engines. Thanks for your help and advice
Web Design | | Jumman0 -
Prismic.io CMS and SEO?
Looking for community feedback: Some of our In house developers want to use Prismic.io over Wordpress for it's alleged ease of organizing and "deploying" content. It's essentially a repository for content from which you make API calls to. It's a rather new platform. There a few posts in Quora around SEO but looking to see if anyone has had experience with platform. My concern is around page load times, excessive server requests, and content viewed as code. Any thoughts/ experiences would be much appreciated!
Web Design | | ArcherMalmo0 -
Funnel tracking with one page check-out?
Hi Guys, I'm creating a new website with a one page checkout that follows the following steps:
Web Design | | Jerune
1. Check availability
2. Select product
2. Select additional product & Add features
3. Provide personal information
4. Order & Pay I'm researching if it is possible to track all these steps (and even steps within the steps) with Google Analytics in order to analyse checkout abandonment. The problem is only that my one-page checkout has only one URL (I want to keep it that way) and therefore can not be differentiated on URL in the Analytics funnel. To continue to the next step also the same button (in a floating cart) in used to advance. The buttons to select/choose something within one step are all different. Do you guys know how I can set this up and how detailed I can make this? For example, is it also possible to test at which field visitors leave when for example filling in their personal information? Would be great if you can help me out!0 -
Will SASS ruin my SEO?
Hello, I am thinking about using SASS for my website, striping the current CSS style sheets and translating it all to SASS.. will this hurt my SEO?
Web Design | | DanielBernhardt0 -
Attachment Pages
i have hundreds/thousands of images on my site, but for some reason the images on this page - http://indigocarhire.co.uk/top-of-the-range-car-hire/ - are being flagged as attachment pages, meaning im getting errors for duplicate titles, missing metas ect why are these images and only these ones being flagged up, they have been added in exactly the same way as every other image on the site appreciate any advice Thanks
Web Design | | RGOnline0 -
Effect of Off-Site Images
I'm getting to start work with a new client, and I've run across something I've never had to deal with before, off-site images. The site I'll be working on is for an appliance retailer, both online and physical. The way they've had their site built (not something I was part of) a third party company maintains the product inventory side of things. They're sourcing from about 35 different manufacturers, and this third party has direct access to the product information streams. They push the weekly updated information to my clients site. What this means, though, is that the product images don't live on the client's site. They're hotlinked from the third party's inventory doohickey. I've never seen something quite like this before. Has anyone else? Any ideas as to what problems I may face when it comes to on-site SEO?
Web Design | | MRCSearch0 -
Finally have a budget for a great seo ecommerce site but need help choosing wordpress, joomla, modx, magneto or? Thank you in advance for your generosity of time
We finally have a budget and want to dump our intuit/homestead site www.originalartbroker.com Our budget is 5k-10k but could do more if needed. I am slowly catching my competition with this homestead site that I built. But I do realize it is time to step back, figure out what is best, and hire a pro to get the job done. I am green in the seo and web development arena so please go easy on me and please help to point me in the right direction. Just went out on a limb a couple years ago playing with homestead.com site software and built what we have today. Didn't know anything about website development...it sort of just happened. I feel and know that homestead.com solution is hindering what we could be doing due to the bloated nature of the site and inability to perform such task as 301 redirects etc.... I have been able to slowly attain first page seo rankings on keywords based of the artists we carry using this po-dunk homestead platform to build my site after a ton of work education thanks to seomoz and a lot of you. But, have never asked for help and could really use some generosity of time in explaining a solution that would work best for our business. Do we just go with a wordpress site that is similar to our current setup and use their plugins? Do we use a cms software solution like magneto or joomla? We will only have 200-300 pieces at any given time. We are constantly selling and buying new pieces providing us content. We are need of a site that can perform well in terms of seo. I have heard of a lot of people talking about joomla, wordpress, and magneto. Would like to be able to have a product catalogue that ultimately sends whatever inventory we are uploading to our social sites and blogs so I don’t have to pump the product out to all of these sites. We offer free custom framing with our pieces and it would be nice to have a program that could wrap the photos of the pieces with the different frames for our customers. When I add a new piece I would like this software to have a predesigned product page that it plugs the information into. I would like it to create the url extension based of the artists name, medium used, and piece name to create unique and individual urls. I would like it to also create its own H tags throughout that product page according to the artist name description, and medium used. I would like to be able to sink this up to google merchant and other sites to carry our product. Bottom line is we sell art. We sell pieces by specific artists. We are constantly buying and selling. I need something powerful that keeps up with our content
Web Design | | forecastedinvestments1