Generally speaking, a parallax scrolling website is a visually stimulating, one-page website presenting users with a background moving slower or faster than the foreground. To give you an idea, AWWWards have identified the top 20 parallax websites of 2013 here.

Disadvantages of SEO

What’s tricky about these engaging websites is that the design usually includes only one long page of HTML and one URL that can be linked from search engines. Every time a user searches for a specific item, they land on the main page of the parallax website and not necessarily for what they were looking for. This means that there is only one meta title and meta description to optimize. Further, when choosing the main keywords for the SEO of a website, we focus on up to a few keywords per page. In this case, the site is only one page so this provides a limited number of keywords that you can expect the site to come up for in search results.

An SEO Solution

One way to counteract this problem would be to identify what content is important by deciding what would and wouldn’t be searched for by a user. For example, if a website specializes in baked goods, we would have to identify the major keywords that should rank well for the business online. Let’s say that the website focuses on selling cupcakes, birthday cakes and wedding cakes. In addition to the main page of the website that has all of the information including contact information, photos etc., on a long parallax page, some secondary pages with details on cupcakes, birthday cakes and wedding cakes can be created that could then be optimized for its own keywords, title tags, descriptions and other customized content. What’s important to remember here is that content should not be duplicated from the main page. The baked goods will only be identified on the main page, with details such as cupcake flavours and pricing included on its respective page.

By doing this, one main page with parallax design along with additional pages for the actual products will be created. This is a great way to integrate the trendy parallax scrolling web design with a conventional multi-page website without causing an issue for SEO.