Word Count of pages

[Nofxz]

I pulled this from another posting:Quote:I don't see the point of splitting the page up into 4 pages. If the overall theme of the text is Garage Sale Tips then it makes sense to place all the content into one page. However if the Garage Sale tips are divided up into 4 seperate seactions then I would split it up into 4 pages. Having it split up into 4 pages gives you the luxury of 4 different page titles. You could have 4 tighly themed pages rather than one page with a bunch of themes.I like to think about page content more in the context of themes anymore because I know that this is the way that the search engines are eventually going to look at pages when they become more clever.Hope this makes sense.Hi Gardenstew,It does make sense.But this is assuming users in the future will begin to search more specifically, ie "Garage Sale Tips" vs "Garage Sales Tips for dealing with early birds".And given what keyword tools such as overture and wordtracker tell us, it seems surfers still like to use more generic phrases.I would recommend breaking up the page for several reasons ...Smaller pages will load quickerAn additional four (maybe 5 if you use an overview) pages with PR may even help your ranking.Tighter focus on keywords for each page also helps search engines.I rarely read "paragraphs" with more that 2 sentences ... do you know anyone who actually finished that page. I think break your contents/ site into as manyLOGICAL RELATED themes / links as possible.Whether it has many pages or not, it doesnt really matter. as long as the amount of contents or quality are still there.Again, but that will mean that you are forcing the user to click one more time onto another page, you may run a risk of losing the interest of visitor. He may shut down the window completely.again, break your contents/ site into as many LOGICAL RELATED themes / links as possible...I had a site with real estate listings and they were brokern in to three categories...each category was one page with how ever many listings were in that category....sometimes as many as 100. I changed the format to only allow 5 listings per page and then wound up with about 20 pages per section....this grew my site 10 fold...and provided more pages to fill with keyword rich text links pointing to other pages in my site.....take ozzu for example...wouldn't it be easier to read a thread that was one long page vs. breaking it up into x amount of post per page...yes but it would make the site smaller and the pages topic might be diluted due to all the text being lumped together...I vote for splitting the page.As for google liking pages with 500-600 words....I think that is being mis-interpreted....google likes (requires) pages that are under 100k...text and code included....it really likes pages that are around 10k...if you use impropper coding techniques then you could use up all 10k just with code and then you text is more labor intensive for the bots to find.Here's some good resources on the subject:http://101topranking.com/html_coding.htmI'm looking for the article that discusses the page size issues and results....hang on yeah!..so I get to correct myself......here's the article on what size page ranks the best: http://www.cmssatellite.com/What.htmIt seems from this research that the 30-60k page is the optimal size.....Thanks guys - you all gave some really valid and interesting input.Everyone's pretty much touched on the concept of "themes", "breaking pages up", "pages with logical themes" and "tighter focus on keywords".Ok, so let's then take this quote from Gardenstew thenQuote:I would start here to figure out what words your page is optimized for: http://www.keyworddensity.comLet's go back to the real estate example above...for most RE sites I would focus the index page theme/topic on "My Town/My State Real Estate" those will be the most competitive regional terms....then I focused the internal pages on My Town Homes, MT Condos, MT Land...etc......these keywords can usually be obtained by internal linking alone.....since I have many pages pointing to each section using the keyphrase in the link text....As for the way the pages were created when I limited the display to 5 listings and thus grew the site by 20 pages...these pages were only optimized in the title, keywords, and description areas...the information from the listings is entered by the broker....with no SEO intensions....so the page content is not really helping in this case...but we are still getting results. I have done this on a few sites and it has worked every time.So how does this affect you: I wouldn't worry about the keyword density of the pages....I would focus more on pointing text rich links at that page from other pages in your site.....that's if you are wanting this page to rank high....once you get in the top twenty then go back to the page and focus on the content....if you even need to....Hi phaugh,Yes, I see the positives more clearly now after that post. The way I see it, breaking your pages up gives you the opportunity to create additional/unique titles, which you could then carry-on through to the keywords and description areas. Whereas this is not really possible with just one huge page. Sure, you could manage to get away with the keyword density thing, but I'm thinking you'd be missing out on the chance to fully untilise the page title and description tag.In effect, breaking up pages allows for more specific themes/topics and a better chance at increasing your ranking in Google (or Yahoo, etc).Your RE example makes sense; in fact, it closely mirrors the structure I am currently employing on my site. That is, work around specific regions (ie themes/topics) with the title, keyword and description areas and let the database populate the content relative to these regions.I do get it now.Thanks mate. Much appreciated.I'll all let you know how I go.I'm off....Looks like you on your way...cheers!