I'm considering re-designing my personal website to promote my web services in my local area.
My issue is whether to do a one page website with a scroll-to navigation system. What effect does this have on SEO. As i understand it, you set stuff like h1's and meta description on specific page content. How does this work when all of your different content is on one page?
If you have only one web page then it will most likely cover several topics (e.g. each web service offered) and thus not be focused on any one topic. This will make it more difficult to get that page to rank well for one specific topic (you only get one page title, one h1, etc).
If you break it down into multiple pages you will be able to focus each page on a specific topic. Additionally, interlinking your pages will also give you a (very) small boost as you will have the advantage of anchor text and PR transfer.
Ahh nearly 2014 and still a relevant question. This really is a frustrating constraint (especially from Google, the standards advocate..).
I've been looking around and just though it's worth noting that:
window.history.pushState(data, title, url);
Might be worth looking at, as you can update the url of your site when loading AJAX content, making it indexable and directly accessable (from what I gather so far, I haven't written my own implementation yet but if you google the dynamic pages from the demo mentioned below it works).
There's a good article introducing this method on moz, and they have also provided a working demo here so you can see it in action.
The problem with one page websites is that you are giving away the benefits of having multiple pages which are all congregated in one word: diversification.
You can be more precise in the topic you will have to develop for each page. Also one of those benefits is the relationships you could create semantically and contextually between the pages. In a world that is being taking over by mobile devices, you will be delivering less scrollable content, improving user engagement and potentially better performance.
As a consequence of having multiple pages, you will be creating opportunities to develop vertical niches as your website grows. If you have a measurement plan, you will be improving the user experience by tracking and analysing the users' behaviour and making those changes accordantly.
In terms of SEO this is a challenge, it will be required to have a top to bottom strategy to create content that will be around a main topic. Then, the inner pages will be considered a supporting idea to the main topic. And so on.
I believe that you now can see that having subdomains is not a good idea if you want to develop niches later on. In the SEO world subdomains are considered separate websites. People have reported several times that their rankings improved once the took the decision to move from a subdomain to a inner folder.
Even though you have a multifaceted business, at the end of they day you serve a broader industry market, and that will be understood by search engines, especially Google.
As others said above, better create a nice website structure with different pages regarding your services. You have to know that now search engines (SE) tend to rank those sub/services/product pages with higher rank compared to your home page. Optimize your homepage for your brand and your other pages accordingly to the service/product you offer. Make sure you don't focus on the same keywords on your different pages, otherwise you'll have keywords cannibalization and your ranking factor will suffer because of that.
There are more than 1k factors for SE ranking. Probably you know the most important, but there are less know ranking factors that are very important like having separate pages for "Contact us/About us/Terms and conditions/Privacy policy/etc". Search engines see that understand it and it takes it as a consideration when giving your website rank. This is called a trust factor.
