One-page websites are all the rage in modern web design particularly for high-tech brands and consumer focused products. They’re an effective way to teach consumers about your brand in one, long-form summary page, peppered with cool animations and interactive elements.
If, however, you offer more than one product, the one page format may not allow you to be found for a slew of different topics on search engines. How do you optimize for multiple keywords or build links from other sites back to just one page?
If you are going to use this trendy one-page approach to your website you can optimize for search with care and purpose in your design.
Homepage as Landing Page
Before we begin talking about optimizing the different sections on your page, I need to make something clear. When you have just one page to work with, everything you put on that page needs to be interesting and motivate visitors to take some sort of action. In other words, your homepage is also your only landing page and needs to function as such.
A big, bold call to action needs to live somewhere in your content, whether it be right out of the gate at the top of the page, or somewhere farther down near product and service information. No matter how you get visitors to your site through optimization, they need to have one main action to take.
Pagination and In-Page Linking
Using pagination and in-page linking is a powerful way to help the search robots understand what the different sections of your homepage represent. Pagination in web design is simply breaking out each page (or in this case section) by using a system of separation, such as sequential numbers or new headers. For good optimization on a one-page site to work, consider adding a brand new title to each content section. This signals the robots that the new “page” with new content and different topics is starting.
In-page linking is a great way to break out the navigation at the top of your page to the different content sections of your homepage. With this type of linking, you can set each word in your navigation bar so it leads directly to a different header and section within your homepage. In other words, you’re sort of fooling search bots (and sometimes humans) into thinking each section of your homepage is a new page within your website.
This makes navigation simple and friendly for human users and it gives the search robots a simple, categorized path to your different pieces of content.
Keep Your Content Fresh
Building a strategy for refreshing homepage content is good SEO strategy, plain and simple. This means you need a good plan in place to continually update your homepage content and send fresh signals to search engines. Not only does this give you room to test out new content in each of your different sections and measure how your audience reacts, it also lets you test out different or new keywords to rank on.
Don’t Forget Searchable Citations
Your homepage is still about representing who you are, what you do and where you exist in the world. Don’t forget to add citation data at the bottom of your page, including your business name, address, email and phone number. Adding this and an SEO paragraph to your page helps Google understand you’re a real business, not just a single landing page. The search robots are pretty good at picking up context clues- all you have to do is ensure they have enough information to make informed decisions.
Looking for other ways to improve your on-page SEO? Our friends at Constant Contact have developed a handy tool for improving your citations across the web. You can check out our intro to SinglePlatform here:
