Practical Tips on Optimizing Single Page Websites

Multiple-page website architecture has become so common that almost everybody, especially SEO practitioners, may have just about forgotten that single-page websites do exist.

If your client insists upon a single-page website, then it could find you in all sorts of trouble because you simply may not be up to the job of optimizing it, because in all probability you would have never ever done such an implementation.

While this may not have been surprising given that earlier Google was pretty much useless in ranking single-page websites, in the current context, you can no longer afford to ignore this website structure because Google has become far more intelligent and smarter, and started acknowledging the presence of single-page websites.

This is the reason why there has been a resurgence of interest in such websites. Some essential SEO tips on optimizing single page websites.

Stick With Pagination

Google bots have traditionally favored sites that were paginated, but in the case of single-page sites where multiple pages do not exist, you need to restructure the format by making sure that the site is not left without organized pagination.

This can be done by creating clear and discrete sections, each of which should be devoted to separate purposes.

By doing this you also automatically make site navigation a lot easier. Separating the content into distinct sections also gives you the opportunity of defining appropriate keywords for each section and thereafter optimizing it for that particular section.

For example, it is possible to use a specific keyword in one section’s headline or body and use another in a different section.

The optimum way of separating different sections on a single-page site is to assign a separate <div>. You must, however, keep in mind that although ids may be used for organizing content, they should not be employed as keywords.

This is because CSS tags are typically not SEO-friendly. You may, however, use anchor links in the HTML format for optimization.

Anchor Link Optimization

Being a single-page website there are obviously no separate links or URLs to optimize, so you only have the anchor link to play around with. These links are employed to let users jump to different sections in the same web page. Now, these sections can only be optimized by optimizing the relevant anchor links.

For optimal results this can be done by using DIV ids as the anchor links, and then using the links on the navigation bar. For example, if there’s a section devoted to fruit delivery on the single-page website, the DIV id may be named as <div id=“fruit-delivery-services”>.

The anchor link can be created as <a href=“#fruit-delivery-services”>Fruit+Delivery+Services</a>. By this simple operation, you have managed to generate a URL that is completely functional and search engine-friendly on the webpage.

Plug on With Link Building

Link building is so intrinsic to search engine optimization that every SEO practitioner is extremely familiar with it. Even though it has been around for a considerably long time, it remains a very good way of optimizing the webpage.

However, the days when bad-quality and spammy links served to drive SERP rankings are well and truly gone. You need to stay focused on acquiring backlinks from sites with high authority and leveraging them to enhance your own site’s reputation and authority.

Google continues to place a high reliance on good-quality links from relevant and reliable sources for arriving at the page ranks.

For those who may be wondering about how to earn links from the different anchor links present in a single-page website, all you need to do is to create anchor-text backlinks on sites with authority by contributing to their blog section and deliberately inserting your anchor text link in the author bio.

For instance, continuing the earlier quoted example, this could be <a href=“http://example.com/#fruit-delivery-services”>Fruit+Delivery+Services</a>

Use H1 Tags to Distinguish Sections

The importance of an H1 tag that is optimized need not be explained to you if you are familiar with the concepts of conventionally-structured website optimization.

In this case, it is a custom to use a single H1 tag on the webpage, and use H2 or H3 to optimize the other headings.

In the case of a single-page website, all you need to keep in mind is to use an H1 tag separately for each section and leave the bot to sort out by itself all the information- this is not difficult as the H1 tag serves to indicate that the content following it is distinctive.

Readability and Relevance of Content

Since single-page sites have so much information crammed into them, it is natural for you to be wondering as to how Google will be able to sort it out, and whether it could give rise to issues of relevancy.

While earlier, this could indeed have been a problem, Google has become far more sophisticated, and with the rolling out of the Hummingbird update, it is able to go beyond mere keyword matches and can closely match the search query in its entirety in a way that interprets what the user is really looking for.

This development is indeed very good news for developers of single-page sites because now there’s nothing to beat this type of a website for presenting lots of content in the same place.

However, the quality of the content remains as important as ever, with Google coming down heavily on sites that carry content that is not relevant, reliable, original, and organized.

Focus on Fresh Content

You must abide by content freshness factor used by Google if you wish to achieve a higher ranking.

When the subject boils down to content, Google is extremely strict and rigid. It would not think twice before penalizing your page for poor content that was created without following high content quality guidelines.

Content freshness is inevitable if you update some portions of the page including customer feedbacks, portfolio etc. You could incorporate a small Twitter feed somewhere on the site.

Maintaining content freshness could be a wee bit tricky. It is essential to continuously refresh your content for higher rankings.

One effective way of tackling this issue could be to delete old product reviews by newer reviews from users. You could consider adding an extra page for a user-generated content or a blog.

Conclusion

If you follow these effective tips carefully you could be successful in optimizing your single page. Keep updating yourself about new techniques and methods.