How to SEO a Single-Page website

Question

I am creating a new website for a client, and I think a single page website / layout will be pretty neat. There is not that much detailed content, it is a company that imports a lot of products from different companies. So it will be a bit of a showcase of the different types of products / equipment you can order. Of the whole catalog only maybe 10 products are actually shown.

Now I have the basic structure with sections and links like:

#home / #products / #equipment / #services / #contact.

Now from what I understand is that Google does not index links containing #, so there will be no problem of duplicate content, everything will be indexed as the frontpage.

Now what I want to optimize is searching. This company is agent of some product in the country, meaning only they have the permission to import and sell that product. This means that when somebody searches for product x, this website pops up as the first hit.

Now can I make it that they will be automatically brought to the #products part of the website directly from google.

I was thinking of something like having google index the different sections as different pages. Is something like that possible?

Answer 1

Single page websites are bad for SEO. Period.

Since search engines rank web pages and not websites you need to make sure each web page is tailored towards a specific topic so it optimized to rank well for that topic. Putting more then one topic on a page dilutes that page's value for each topic and thus hurts its chances of ranking for both topics. It gets worse as you add more topics to that page. It also isn't useful for users since they have to sift through content they're not interested in to find the content they are looking for.

Additonally, internal links are valuable tools for SEO. They're almost as good incoming links from external sites and their anchor text does have value. Having a single page website means you are missing out on them.

I was thinking of something like having google index the different sections as different pages. Is something like that possible?

No.

Answer 2

You can have accesible/indexable pages of each section as an alternative version of your webapp. In your situation you need to have this pages: Home, Products, Equipment, Services, Contact

When javascript isn't enabled you need to have 5 pages. Each page need to have specific title and show specific section to user (not the others). When javascript is enabled you can load your webapp.

Fot big projects you should look this project: http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/ (seo example includes datasource.php to do what i have told)

Example:

Home: /

<nav><stong>Home</strong> <a href="/products">Products</a>...</nav><div id="webapp">Home static content</div><script>window.onload=function(){ /*load webapp*/ }</script>

Products: /products

<nav><a href="/">Home</a> <stong>Products</strong>...</nav> <div id="webapp">Products static content</div><script>window.onload=function(){ /*load webapp*/ }</script>

etc