However, they can take a fair bit of rap for not being particularly good for your SEO due to their non-paginated structure, and the fact that they can only accommodate a single URL, set of meta data, H1 header, and one or two keywords.
However, while optimising single-page sites can be more challenging, it’s by no means impossible. Here are some helpful tips and tricks to help you out.
1. Start With Your Keywords
One of the key issues with single-page websites is that you’re generally putting all your eggs into one basket when it comes to keywords as you can only optimise the page for one, or possibly two. So you need to make them good.
Never guess at your keyword. Always conduct thorough research and ensure your chosen word or phrase reflects your business and your product or service. Make sure your main keyword is in your title tag, meta tag and appears in your main content, but don’t be tempted to keyword stuff. And whatever you do, never sacrifice the flow or coherence of your content for the sake of your SEO. A site that doesn’t read well will do nothing for your SEO (unless you want to be banished to the end of the SERPs).
If you deliver quality content that reads well and is relevant to your target audience, organic traffic will occur naturally.
2. Consider a Blog
If you love the idea of a single-page site, but want to target a handful of different keywords, then consider adding a blog. This allows you to produce more content that’s relevant to your business and therefore target more keywords.
Producing valuable, optimised content encourages greater interaction with your target audience, makes the site more robust and content-heavy, and makes it easier for the crawlers to index your content.
Of course it’s a bit of cheat, because it means you don’t really have a single-page website, but a main page supported by a blog with lots of keyword-rich articles. But it’s a great solution.
3. Separate Your Content
Unpaginated architecture is one of the biggest complaints about single-page sites, because the crawlers naturally prefer a paginated structure, which traditional websites provide.
But you can still do this on a single-page site. Start by separating your content into a compelling and organised format. For example, if it’s a business site, make sure it’s divided into clearly defined, industry standard sections, such as home, about, products, blog, contact, etc.
With each section serving a specific purpose, you could optimise each for a different keyword should you wish, by using multiple H1 tags throughout – usually a no-no, but a great tactic under these circumstances – and optimising the content as appropriate.
Employ a different <div> to each section to separate and classify it, and don’t forget to optimise your anchor links. This will give your page a clearly defined structure for people and crawlers alike.
4. Seek Authority
Link building may be declining in importance, but don’t discount it altogether. Seek out influential people or websites in your industry, and offer them guest posts with links back to your site or suggest working on an article or project together to gain greater exposure.
Social media is a huge help here. Make sure you include social media buttons on your content, especially your blogs, so they’re easy to share, and promote yourself on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media networks. This has the added bonus of helping with audience engagement as well as improving your SEO.
5. Keep It Fresh
If you want to rank highly you need to constantly refresh your website and this can be tricky on a single-page site. Make sure you regularly refresh the main content, swapping out things like product reviews, customer feedback and portfolio items.
Of course, having a blog will help immensely with this, and you could always include a Twitter feed in a sidebar for the sake of freshness too.
6. Check the Speed
By their very nature, single-page websites can be slow to load, as they could contain a lot of text, images and video. And this is bad for the crawlers (and your users!). So you should regularly run a speed audit to check your site isn’t getting too bogged down.
Make sure you use a good web hosting company with a fast server, optimise your images so they’re not too large, remove unnecessary plugins, make use of browser caching, and compress your website using Gzip.
7. Use Google Analytics
You should be using a web analytics tools such as Google Analytics anyway, but you need to pay particular attention to a single-page site. Monitor your site carefully, paying attention to the number of views and any changes to your view count every time you refresh your content. Pay close attention to the length of time people spend on your site, whether they’ve been drawn in by links from other sites, and keep an eye on the effect your social media campaigns are having.
Make sure you dig into the analytics and use that data to make the necessary changes.
Though not ideal for every type of website, single-page websites are a fantastic option for a number of sites, including landing pages, specified business offerings, and storytelling.
Optimising a single-page website requires more effort than a traditional website, but it certainly isn’t impossible. It simply requires a little creativity and close attention to detail.
Have you tried any of these techniques to optimise your single-page site? What worked for you and do you have any other tips to share. Tell us below…