Technology continues to grow and trends in web design are no different. The latest of which is the Single Page Website or the One-Page Layout. With the use of CSS3, AJAX, and Javascript, web designers have been able to make navigating a website extremely fluid by using an elevator like affect that takes you to different sections while staying in the same page. Normally, the experience would be a navigation to a new page with it’s own URL and load time. The single page website design allows the user to save a lot of time by having quick access to the different sections.
Note: check out Web Design Ledger for some great Single Page Designs
How does Google see a Single Page Website?
Google has come out and said that if the structure of your website is correct and the content it contains is great you should rank as you would normally like any other website. Here is a video of Matt Cutts, Head of Webspam at Google on the subject:
So, according to Google, I should be fine? Wrong!
Google is saying that your website will be indexed the same as other websites, meaning it will look at the content and pick out the structure to show in search results. See, every page that gets created on a regular website is an opportunity for you to add meta data and structured content to rank for multiple topics. The use of a single page website does not, because only one page will be indexed.
When should a Single Page Website be used?
While it may not be beneficial to use a single page website from an SEO perspective, a Single Page Website is great for single topic focused websites and PPC/Adwords Ad landing page.
That’s great and all but…
If you do have a Single Page website, don’t panic. There still is a way for you to rank on search engines however the approach is more based on linkbuilding than on-page optimization. Which means you will need more high quality referrers than your competitors.
Single Pages are cool, but they are not as effective
To sum it up, Single Page Websites are harder to optimize for search engine rankings and targeting multiple keywords which is something many businesses, small or big depend on, as an initial and sometimes, only source of traffic.