You bet :-)

Thanks!

Chris

Hi Chris,

OK, I understand where you're coming from.

Point taken.

Thanks,

Terence.

Hi there,

I'm not familiar with those, sorry.

Regarding one-page sites, it's really up to the user to determine if it's appropriate for their needs. My task is just to create themes that hopefully fulfill a need a lot of people have.

While proper markup and using standard best practices are absolutely an approach I fully take into practice, I don't care too much about making sure a robot likes my site/design. I build themes for people, not robots. Google is obviously a major player for generating traffic, but at the end of the day, people (not robots) are the ultimate judge of how effective/nice your site is.

Thanks!

Chris

Chris,

By the way ~ backbone.js and phantom.js [ http://backbonetutorials.com/seo-for-single-page-apps/ ] do something similar to swfaddress. Only some would say they do it better.

Maybe you are familiar with these?

Terence.

Hi Chris,

For websites that are tightly focused on a single topic and don’t have a ton of content, I am sure a Single Page website can work nicely. For example ~ a Single Page site would be appropriate as the landing page for a PPC / Adwords ad, since these landing pages should have a single-topic focus and be optimized for just that one topic, the subject of your ad.

However, if your website doesn’t fit the above profile, then I wonder if a Single Page is such a good idea, particularly if being found in searches is important to your business.

Why? On-page SEO!

“On-page” SEO ~ the best practices you apply to the individual pages on your website ~ descriptive and keyword-rich title and meta tags, header tags, linking to other pages on your site using keyword-rich anchor text, and having your content organized in a strong semantic and informational hierarchy.

It is in this regard that I think the Single Site website fails (unless it fits the profile above).

SEO is a page-by-page competition for ranking and when developing your website architecture (the structure of the directories and individual pages), it’s best practice to limit each page to a single topic, so that each page can be optimized for its unique subject matter. Each page (whether static or generated with dynamic server-side code) can be optimized for its particular subject.

With Single Page websites, however, you have only a single title tag and meta description tag. These two tags are probably the single most important on-page SEO elements, conveying to the search engines the EXACT topic of each page. They are also displayed on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) when one of your pages is listed.

You get only 60-63 characters for the title tag content and 155 characters for the meta “description” tag, so if you want your site optimized for more than one topic, you simply won’t have the room to leverage these most important on-page SEO elements.

Also, a Single Page website means only one page in Google’s or Bing’s index.

Search engines will index all the pages of your website, providing multiple opportunities for your site to come up in searches. When your site consists of only one page, a single page is exactly what you’ll have indexed.

My conclusion: I really love many of the Single Page websites I’ve seen ~ and "Panels" especially. It’s a visually appealing effect if your site fits the appropriate Single Page profile. But if your site has numerous topics and sub-topics, then I think it best to skip this approach and go the convention route of individual pages.

But, I am sure you must have considered this and I welcome your thoughts.

Terence.

Hi there,

Is there a concern about SEO with this theme? This theme uses standard URLs and page structures (h tag, paragraph tag, etc.). Google should still see page links for content not initially shown on the site.

I'm not familiar with swfaddress, so I can't offer much in terms of it's usefulness.

Thanks!

Chris

Chris, from an SEO point of view, would you consider building in something like "swfaddress" [http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/] or, ~ and I know its a bit of a non sequitur, but ~ do you see some other way to provide the necessary SEO structure for a single page site?

Terence.