Which is better for SEO, one page for all products, or one page for each product?

Question

So, as the new guy, I have been tasked with the monumental problem of improving my job's search rankings for a few specific pages. Looking at the design philosophy of the page, I've run into a big question. Index.html is a static page that lists all products. It's about 5 "screens" tall at 1366 x 768. I've considered putting schema.org tags in, but if someone came looking for our 10th product, even if they made it to our page, they'd still have to scroll down to find it. While I understand that more users are familiar with scrolling, and it isn't a big deal anymore, I still feel it is probably negatively hurting our SEO.

This leads me to the meat of my question, would it be better to have multiple product pages even if we only have one or two hundred words to say about them?

Answer 1

Expanding on John Conde's answer:

Search engines such as Google will pay more attention to the content that is located at the top of your page, simply because it is more likely that this content represents the topic of your page. If you list 9 products in 3 rows, like so:

| Product A | Product B | Product C |
-------------------------------------
| Product D | Product E | Product F |
-------------------------------------
| Product G | Product H | Product I |

Then products A, B and C are likely to rank much better than products G, H and I.

Answer 2

Put each product on its own page. That way each page is focused on that one product. That's good for human users and search engines.

By having one page per product you can optimize that page for that product. That means the page title, headings, etc contain keywords directly related to that product. Also, incoming links to those pages will contain keywords focused on that product. That's all good things.

Also, if that page is very large, which it sounds like it is, the search engine may not retrieve and/or parse the entire page as they have size limits. Your products on the bottom of the page may never be found by the search engines and thus never available in their index.