Hello, this is John Locke, and today I'm coming at you with a story that I saw on
a SEO forum. This is about a person whose employer went from having a
multiple page website to a single page website. This person was lamenting
the fact that their SEO tanked after this, stating, "I tried to warn
him. I tried to tell him over and over that having a multiple
page site is better than having a single page website for SEO." Let's examine in
depth why this happened. When you move from a multiple page website to a single page
website, what happens to your SEO. Lastly, if you are going to do a single page
website, some things that you can do to increase your chances of having a
bit more attraction in search engines. The first thing with a single
page website is, you're giving up the ability to have internal linking. One
of the things that people don't realize is internal links pass PageRank. Pages
on your site, when they have a certain amount of PageRank, it has the same effect as an
external link. They pass that PageRank in between pages on your site as well. When you
don't have the ability to internally link, you're giving up some of that
PageRank. You have one page that you can rank with, and that's it. The other thing
that is difficult with a single page website is, you only have one title tag.
You've only got one page to have a subject about. Google ranks web pages,
not web sites. It's web pages. The site itself is taken
into consideration, such as the subject matter or the bucket that Google has put
that site in, the topic matter. Ultimately it comes down to this, Google is
ranking pages. If you have one page, you've only got one chance to to rank
for whatever keywords you're trying to hit. So you're not going to
able to target those extra keywords. Unless you've got a page that's 10,000 miles long,
you're not going to be able to rank for all these different keywords. It's
much easier to do it when you have tightly focused pages, that have one
subject, and they have unique title tags, saying "This is what this page is
about." But when you've got one single page, you can only have one title tag.
It makes it much more difficult to rank. The other thing that happens to with single
page sites is all the links that you have in coming or going toward
that home page, no external links are going to any other pages. On a
multiple page site, you can have unique pages linked to each other. When you're trying to
focus a single page site on all these different keywords, there's going to be a
limit to how many keywords Google thinks the page is the best result. Tightly focused pages are
much better than a catch-all page, that you're trying to rank for 200 keywords.
That is just not going to happen. What can you do if you have a single page website,
to try and increase your chances of ranking. Most the time, and you're going to see this
with restaurant sites and other types of sites -- maybe it's a single location service business,
but more than likely something like a restaurant or something like that. What
you can do is break your page into multiple sections using HTML, specifically the section
tag. Then what you'll want to do is -- normally you will have one h1
tag -- one headline tag for the entire page. But what you'll do
in this case, with a single page website is, each section is going to have its own
h1. to try and simulate having multiple pages. Also you should have
IDs, like IDs in the HTML markup, for each section. In the main navigation, let's
say that you have pages named About Us, Our Services,
Contact, History. Each of those would be a section
with an ID corresponding to that section. When you click on the links in the main navigation,
the browser scrolls down to that section of the page. As I said previously, if you
move from a multiple page website to a single page website, your rankings are
going to drop. Because you're going to rank for less keywords then you did before.
The pages will not be as focused. Since you only have one title tag. Whatever your
main keyword is, that's what you're going to be going for. But all these other
secondary keyword phrases that you might have been ranking for in the past, and
getting traffic from -- you're not going to have that anymore. But if you
are insistent on doing a single page site, those are some things that I
would do. Make sure that you're breaking it out in sections. Have h1s for
each section. Include ID tags for each section,
so it looks a bit it's broken up, more like a multiple page
website, even though it's not. A single page website, it's not my recommendation to ever do. Like I
said, if you're on a single page website, and you're not getting the traffic that
you want, move to a multiple page website. It's going to
serve you much better. You'll have a lot more options for trying to rank
stuff. The more pages that you add, the more chances that you're going to get to rank,
the more keywords that you can rank for. Because you can focus those pages. I hope
that answers this question. Hope you're enjoying these videos. My name is John
Locke from Lockedown Design and SEO. We help
manufacturing and industrial firms. We're here publishing every single day.
I'd love to see you subscribe. Have a question? Leave it in the comments below,
we'll answer it in a future video. That's it for now. Until next time, peace.