Forum Moderators: open
I've read that google likes shorter pages (300-400 words). If this is true, does it make sense to use image-text instead of real text any time we have some unoptimized-yet-neccessary text so that we don't waste our "alotted text" on unoptimized stuff?
For instance, my menu bar could be all text, but it would be unoptimized and so we would like to replace it with an image and do the image-map thing. Then, the menu bar wouldn't count towards the alloted text at all and we still have 300-400 words to work with for our body text.
We were thinking of taking this to the extreme and creating everything as images so that the only text will be our highly-optimized paragraphs for each page.
It seems to load fast enough and we're not too worried about link relevance, especially with the OOP going on. Any other problems with this? Thanks.
I really think you're putting too much weight into the idea of "alloted text". Sure, Google likes smaller pages, but there's no penalty for exceeding any arbitrary word limit. Do some random searches and you'll find plenty of sites ranked very highly that have a lot more than 300-400 words on the home page.
The SEO benefit of shorter pages is just that it helps you focus your content more on a certain key word or key phrase and, in theory, have it rank more highly than a lengthy page that discusses several key words/phrases.
But as I said, it's just one piece of the puzzle. Short pages are good, but counting words seems to me (at least) to be too focused on the details and not enough on the bigger picture.
No-one I've seen yet has an accurate figure but it's certainly somewhere between 300 and 500 lines of code (code not lines of text).
A number of SE's like google ignore alt text unless the image is linked to something. Over use of alt tags will also be ignored.
If I know I have a large amount of text on a page I design the site so the main text div is at the top of a page and the header, links div's etc are below the text div.
Simon.
This will give you more than what you could gain by having those words less in your word count.
I've read that google likes shorter pages (300-400 words). If this is true, does it make sense to use image-text instead of real text any time we have some unoptimized-yet-neccessary text so that we don't waste our "alotted text" on unoptimized stuff?
In my experience, with the one site, Google is very happy with pages that have 2000 - 4000 words of text, in clean non-wysiwyg html, as long as the total page size is under 101KB. In fact, all the SE's seem to love text. We have field notes pages that show up in "commercial" serps in the top few spots that are 3000+ words. This seems to be mostly because they're PR4+ and they use certain kw's a number of times in a natural way, and have the right title.
I think that the 300-400 words limit you've read about is wrong. I'd say more like 3000-4000, if anything.
I trade links with a lot of people and on all the sites I'm linked on if I'm below, say half way, the link never gets included. As soon as I creep up the list I get indexed.
I'll have to hunt out a PR5 link page and see what happens.
Simon.
I wonder if it is PR related.
Yeah, Simon, I'm sure having those pages PR4+ helps, but there's nothing wrong with lots of content even on low PR pages. SE's love words... that's what they eat.
We've done well out of it; what would otherwise be an obscure site pulls in traffic on over 50 different, varying, kw combinations a day, because of all the text, (we also get our expected kw serp arrivals too). They all link back to the main pages so a lot of the traffic ends up being productive.
No one should be afraid of having too much text/content on their pages, as long as there's a reason for it being there... if it's artificial, it's a different ball-game.
I guess what I'm getting at would apply to whatever amount of text Google likes, whether it's 400 or 4000 words. If we can make all of that text optimized without watering it down with stuff like menu bar text it seems like it would be better.
We're going to repeat the menu bar links at the bottom of the page with text links, so that should help google know what those links are about, as someone mentioned.
I'm just trying to get the important block of text as close to the top as possible. Let me know if you have any more input. Thanks again.
I'm not worried about the number of words that google likes or that are on my page. The idea was to have every word on our page work towards optimization.
By making the menus into images, there will be no excess words working against us. We are making a blank slate that we can then put all our optimized text into with nothing watering it down.
Is there any down side to this or any way google may penalize us for this?
Thanks.
By making the menus into images, there will be no excess words working against us. We are making a blank slate that we can then put all our optimized text into with nothing watering it down.
One of the main things we are recommending to our clients has been to not use graphical link buttons, and instead use text links for navigation. And the sites where we've done that all do well in the SERPs. So I'd say the benefit from having those anchor text-ed links far outweighs any possible "watering down" of the text in the main / content area of the pages.
One of the main things we are recommending to our clients has been to not use graphical link buttons, and instead use text links for navigation.
Yep.
Now that I've got, "Senior Member", sitting there beside all my posts, I've had people asking me for advice on why they're not doing well in Google, (poor deluded souls that they are, thinking that I can actually help them). Several of the sites have had no text links, just graphics, and not even much straight crawlable html text... you right click and sweep your mouse across the page, (or look at the code), and there's nothing there. SE's love simple html; it makes things easy for them.
Having a great looking, flashy site, doesn't make any difference if no one finds you.
"If you're a commercial site," she says, "you should be buying ads."So i gather worldweb.com and about.com are paying Google a hefty sum for their positions?;)
A google representitive Shari Thurow
I'm not sure if I'm reading this correctly, but if you're saying Shari Thurow is a Google representative, that's not the case.
Shari is part of a company called Grantastic Designs and has written a book called Search Engine Visibility. I've seen her name mentioned in many SEO-related articles, and I know she speaks at a lot of the various conferences ... but she's not a "Google representative".
Don't know Shari myself, but just wanted to clear that up in case she's not around to do it herself.
