poprockart
08-19-2005, 01:34 PM
Hi. As a content publisher site, we have thousands of articles that break after 250 words. Some of these articles end up being 6-8 pages.
Do we optimize each page independently or optimize the entire article before inserting page breaks?
Should we be concerned about keyword density and placement for each page?
Does a spider know that it's one article?
Thanks for your feedback!
Chris Boggs
08-19-2005, 02:57 PM
excellent question, and moniker :p
From what I remember hearing at SES in one of the sessions (will try to find that), the spiders are becoming more capable and willing to crawl deepr when higher word count exists. Don't quote me on it, but I think I heard that as much as 750-800 words now ok, at least for the more advanced crawlers... others hear this?
<added> each page should be treated independently from an optimization point of view, in my opinion. keyword density is not as important as it once was, especially with the alleged increase in semantic capabilities of the crawlers. I would say that the spider probably knows it is all one article, but who knows, it could end up indexing a particular page of it if you are not careful with the linking. Once again, this is but one humble opinion, and I am curious to see other remarks on this. </added>
poprockart
08-22-2005, 10:49 AM
Thanks for the response. I agree that keyword desity is not the only item to consider when optimizing the subsequent pages, but other factors like related links, our H2 subhead tag are only on the first page of our articles. So would it be helpful to have those items on each page of the article?
We're also considering adding a mini table of contents for the longer articles that will have anchor text links to specific sections. This will be a major effort for our staff considering the massive size of the site, so if the spider isn't typically going past the first page, it may not be worth the time investment.
Our time might be best spent optimizing the first page of the article.
Looking forward to more opinions. :-)
Robert_Charlton
08-22-2005, 05:45 PM
Do we optimize each page independently or optimize the entire article before inserting page breaks?
Many considerations involved here, including the user experience, the length of the article, how the article might naturally break, how competitive your search phrases are, and how these phrases might fit into various sections if you do break them.
On long articles which target competitive phrases where there are natural subject breaks anyway, I tend to conceive of the content as a series of related articles rather than just one. This lets me take advantage of page titles, h1 headings, inbound link text, and text position on the page much better than I might with one very long article... and to attract visitors searching for different facets of the subject.
On the other hand, you don't want your visitors having to click around your site unnecessarily. If the article is tight and coherent and focussed around one subject, keep it together, as that makes better sense for both search and visitors.
It generally turns out that what's best for visitors is very often what's best for search, as long, that is, as you keep search in mind so you're not throwing away opportunities. While it can be a tricky balancing act occasionally, designing for users, in the long run, pays off.