Best way to SEO a single-page site with multiple "pages"?

[fuzzybabybunny]

I've got a friend who wants to build a directory website for businesses in each of the 50 states. His current site actually features a separate page for each and every state, so at least 50 html pages in all. Lots of useful data for a spider to comb through.

It's very hard to manage though.

It's much easier to just pass a state's name into the params of a url and use the params to query the DB and use a templating system to create the page on the fly:

www.mysite.com/us/nv

params are 'us' and 'nv' so the website just creates the page on the fly showing results relevent to US and Nevada.

But then this makes the website essentially single-page.

Would this hurt SEO a lot? What's an SEO-optimized way to go about this?

 

[Markbnj]

Don't use querystring params on the user side for a case like this. Set up a url routing scheme either using your framework of choice, or a proxy in front of the web server, such that www.blah.com/state resolves to www.blah.com/view?state=blah, or something along those lines. Frameworks like ASP.NET MVC and django have this built in.

This gives search engines stable urls to find and remember. Secondly have some sort of directory or have a site map that contains links to all these state views, so that the search engines can find them.