Single-Page Website

A single-page website is very suitable for low information websites, where each section might only have a paragraph or two with text—making a subsite for each section superfluous.

The site is easily made responsive for all surfaces, and it grants the user a more continuous experience—eliminating the load time between each section.

The continuous experience also allows for more interesting story-telling, potentially capturing the user’s interest more, and giving them a better experience when visiting your website.

This can be a great alternative for smaller businesses, whose only aim might be to publish some brief information about who they are, what they do and how to contact them. Preferably without having to do too many, if any, updates to their website in the following years.

The choice of a single-page website might seem like a “no-brainer” in such respect, but alas. Another vital element of a business website is their visibility on search engines. Having sub-pages allows the business to customize metadata, keywords and structure specifically for each sub-page, while a single-page website does not give this flexibility.

Does this mean that a multi-page website is the only way to go after all?

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Multi-Page Website

As its name suggest, a multi-page website consists of a landing page and a number of sub-pages. This is very suitable for information dense websites, and provides the user with a familiar navigation structure using a menu listing the sub-pages.

Due to each sub-page being set up on its own, you have the option to search engine optimize (SEO) each page individually—allowing for highly specific search terms and potentially higher search engine rankings.

However, with all of the information spread on several pages, the user has to navigate from page to page. This results in loading time on each page, and if the sub-pages contain scarce information they quickly feel redundant.

Let’s try to improve the SEO on our single-page website instead:

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Single-Page SEO Improvements

A single-page website is arguably more user-friendly than a multi-page website with scarce information on each sub-page. But as search engine ranking is so important, are single-page websites being frowned upon by companies wanting a decent SEO score?

It’s going to depend on what your particular area is, what the topic is, and what kind of layout you come out with. But if it works for you and for users to have that all on one page, for the most part, it should work for Google as well.

Matt Cutts, Google

Luckily, there are some tricks you can do to improve the SEO of your single-page website:

1. Section your page

Since you don’t have the option to add multiple pages, it can be advised to seperate your page into multiple sections instead.

Having these sections clearly defined will make your site easier to navigate for users, and search engine spiders will appreciate this too.

Each section should be labeled with a header:

2. Use more than one H1 tag

On a single-page website, a H1 tag can indicate a different section of content. This leads to the page becoming more search friendly, and also easier to navigate for your users.

3. Use CSS to help search engine Spiders

Search engine spiders crawl the web for new website content to index on their engines, and by using CSS id names as anchor links you highlight which sections the spiders should look at.

Using a menu, as you would on a multi-page website, where the menu links to anchors on your single-page, it makes your website easier to navigate both for your users and the spiders.

Each anchor link should have a targeted keyword, related to the information in the section.

An anchor link is set up like this:

<a href="#anchor">LinkText</a>

And can be referenced in a div or section tag like this:

<section id="anchor">
</section>

Clicking the link will then move the user to the section or div with the anchor id on your page.

More tricks

You can read this article for more tricks on how to make your single-page website more accessible for the search engine spiders.

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In conclusion

The choice between single-page and multi-page website can be a daunting one for business owners with little to no technological knowledge, but have heard the buzzwords SEO and search engine ranking in almost every business seminar they’ve been to.

If the agency they hire to set up their website are skilled enough in their SEO, then there should not be a major issue making the new site a single-page website—it can even allow the agency to be more creative with their story-telling and result in one cracking website that the visitors surely will remember!