one long page or several short pages

i was just interested in everyones opinion. do you guys or girls think it is better to have one webpage with a ton of content or is it better to split up the content into serveral web pages?

 

Search engine algorithms need to work out what each page is about, and People get turned off by large amounts of information being presented to them (although they will read large amounts through choice over a few pages)To this end I would go for short snappy pages every time.

 

I vote also for small pages.
People lost in lots of the text.
Make some categories.

 

i definitely agree that short pages are better for usability, but i see a lot of long pages that rank great.

prime example: search engine optimization search
bruce clay site (#4)

 

As far as marketing to your surfer goes, there are many arguments for both. Long pages have done extremely well for a lot of people, hence the beloved "sales letter"

 

I had the similar problem recently, one long or a lot of short ones. I ended up with both, and don't see any reason why not to.

 

Short pages are much better from a readability perspective.

I'm not sure it makes much difference for SEO, but more pages does provide for optimization on more keywords.


Brian

 

It gives the eyes more "breathing space" than having one continuous read on a single page.

 

let say you have ten keyword in your article. Is it easier and better to promote that 10 keyword in one long page or 2 keyword each on 5 short page?

I vote for short page, with a header that contain you keyword on top of each page

 

Having several pages gives you opportunity to create targeted page titles related to the whole topic. Since you can't optimize too many keywords for a page effectively, spreading them over the other pages might be worth considering.

 

true, but with one page you can also:
- focus all your link building to that page
- pagerank will be higher since it isn't spread across multiple pages

i may run a test to see if i can isolate the which style ranks better.

 

Hang on Toofast, the way you worded this was one long page alone or a website with smaller pages. The example you give above (bruce clay) is not a valid example as none of those sites are there as a result of the size of page. The phrase is so cometitive that they are more or less link bombed to the top.

let's look at your arguments.

1. Focus all your link building on one page. - Then how do you vary anchor text? and what makes you think that an orphaned page is likely to rank well?

2. PR will be higher since it isn't spread across multiple pages - so what if page rank is higher? PR comes waaaaay down the list of ranking factors and is far outweighed by on the page content.

Let me put a question to you that you should be asking yourself.

How am I going to optimise for multiple phrases with one page, and am I happy putting all my eggs in one or two phrases?

The key to good ranking is focus and theme, you theme your site and focus your pages within that site. If you have two pages with say 1500 words on each, and one is purely focused on say 'web design' while the other covers design, hosting, optimisation', the second will be seen as a general webmastering themed page, and will have to get more links to compete with the first page.

However site A (the first site) has separate pages for 'web design' ' hosting ' and ' Optimisation ', and has a host of links to its main page, plus some nice links with the right anchor text for each page within the site.

OK move along now and look at things in cold hard light. Your a search engine, you get a request for the phrase optimisation. do you send the visitor to a single page where optimisation is covered along with other subjects, or do you send them to a single page (within a larger site) where optimisation is covered exclusively, but where there are other themed pages on subjects that relate to it?

SEO is not rocket science, it is mostly using common logic and best practices.

If you are asking however if 1500 words PURELY on SEO is better than 500 words purely on SEO I would say yes! IMHO

 

I will go on for short pages too because with more and more pages, you will get indexed quickly.
Secondly the buyer runs away when he checks a long page, he thinks its boring so people prefer short page.

 

I vote for longer pages as long as they are not too long to bore the visitors

 

the best performing pages that i have are long pages both PR, SERPS and conversion wise

 

The problem we have here is that we are using non exact terms 'long' short' etc. How about we get some clean clear examples?

 

i agree with you WelshGuy, although i do think that pagerank is a very important factor (even though the google toolbar doesn't show true pagerank).

if you would like to optimize your site for 5 keywords, then splitting into 5 pages would be best. but if you want to focus on 1 keyword, then one long page would be best....as long as it isn't so long and sloppy that you're affecting conversions and usability (you can use bookmark links that take you to bottom of page for usability too).

 

This question has been raised many times and I dont think there is much in it either way. Personally I prefer to spread articles over A4 pages. Not neccessarily because there are any benefits to consider when seotizing your site, but more because it is aesthetically pleasing to look at.

 

I think a short page can be up to twice the browser height.