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I am a freelancer, and I have a small team of freelancers that works with me on large freelance Web development projects. I am offering Web design, development, and SEO.

I created a website with many pages that includes my portfolio, about me, and many more things. I saw that various freelancers created one page website to present their work, and they are ranking on the top Google pages. My question is that as a freelancer, what kind of website design is better to choose for SEO and for visitors, a multi-page site or a single-page site?

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  • Off topic: So the business started again?! I am glad to see that.
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There is no design that is better for SEO - there are rules for content, the only way a single page app could rank higher than a multi-page app is by the content you are showing off. Basically, one of the most basic rules would be to have more than 15% relevant text content on a page. In most multi-page apps this is not possible and because of that, a single-page app that doesn't follow all the rules can sometimes rank higher.

Regardless of this single rule, there are many techniques that you can use to rank a site high, with another example being backlinks. It is logically understandable that a single page app will only have backlinks to its index whilst a multi-page app can have them divided.

It would be better if you provide some examples and test them with various tools like pagespeed, yslow, woorank, etc to have a general understanding of how those sites work in "trending" SEO. Even so, these tools will not total all the algorithms used by search engines and without having access to trending search engines webmaster tools, you are unable to know all the gimmicks a site uses to rank high. For example, even if a site is single page, the sitemap can divide itself into all the links available in the navigation, providing custom content crawlable by search engines. A complete SEO analysis of the sites you are looking at will give you better insight than any answer given here, as research is always better than guessing!

Keep in mind that every search engine has some basic rules and you really need to dig into these sites a bit to figure out what you are dealing with.

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You're thinking about it backwards. Top freelancers can build a crappy site, and still rank. It's about reputation. Contribute to opensource projects, start a blog, get known. This will attract links (reputation) and you'll start to see an improvement. No amount of on-site SEO will matter at this point.

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My impression is that today Google favours websites that are more "compact" than the others, focusing on one or a couple of high value pages instead of coming up with a low value page for every possible keyword. In other words, Google doesn't like watered down websites, that seem to be divided in a lot of useless pages full of content written just to trick their algorithms. Take this with a grain of salt, since I will never be able to know (I don't work for Google) if this is the real reason of their success.

Or maybe what you are worrying about is keyword cannibalism. If you are doing SEO you are supposed to have one main keyword in mind for every page of your website, if there is overlapping (more than one page with the same or similar keywords, or pages with stretched keywords difficult to optimize, which in the end get indexed under the main keyword already used for the main page) the SEO juice of your website is gonna get divided between the different pages, not doubled or multiplied.

That said, keyword placing still matters, but it's possible that the websites you talk about are ranking that good thanks to social media PR and backlinks, as vortex said, tools that I think are more effective than keywords placing nowadays.

I'm not a SEO expert though, maybe you already knew all of this.

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You should have a specific webpage for your each service you’re offering. If you have a service of web development create a separate specific webpage that caters to only the web development service and same goes with other services. The more specific you are the better, do not confuse Google Your homepage only shows the glimpse of what you offer

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