Structuring content for SEO purposes

haven't seen this addressed before....

[Algebrator]

I have a very simple commercial site, selling a single software product. My customers are typically one-time visitors, who have a real, urgent need for this kind of product. I do have all the standard pages such as Features-benefits / FAQs / Testimonials /About us / Ordering / Privacy policy / Links and Resources ...
The web site doesn't need stickiness, visitors are not interested in "useful info" (almost nobody clicks on Resources), so from that perspective I pretty much have all the content that I need.
What I would like to do is add some content with the main purpose of increasing SE rankings. I have quite a bit of text that is indirectly related to the site's topic - good kwd density etc. and I am planning to make it accessible from the Resources page.
Now the question - if you have let's say 10000 lines of text that is splittable in screen-size chunks, how would you do it?
I am asking this question from the SE "digestibillity" perspective, not from the visitor's (they don't click on Resources page anyway). Would you leave it on one big piece - in that way the page is closer to the "surface" , and more
relevant (?). Or, split it in 10 big pages (taking the text
one link level deeper)? Or 100 small pages (does a number of pages have anything to do with SE ranking)?
Or...whatever?

[martinibuster]

I am asking this question from the SE "digestibillity" perspective, not from the visitor's

You have a contradiction.

If it is "digested" by the search engine, and it spits your web page out on the other end, you will be in the situation of receiving visitors on pages that were not designed for visitors.

[ShawnR]

There are lots of threads dealing with structuring content to improve SE performance. Start with the WebmasterWorld welcome page:
[webmasterworld.com...]

In particular the link at the bottom of the first post.

Then start having a look at the relevant forums and try some searches.

Not sure if/where the issue of 'One large page vs many smaller pages' is addressed, but there are many posts addressing the issue in more general terms.

[Algebrator]

ShawnR,
Thanks for the pointers - from what I have found out
it seems that Google likes 5-10K sized pages.

[Algebrator]

MartiniBuster,

The contents that I have in mind while not ideal, is not
completely inappropriate for the visitor - I would assume
that if I correctly word each new page intro, a certain % will still click on "home" to see what the site is really about.

But aside from these somewhat inappropriate "landing pages",
wouldn't my site (meaning specifically the home page) be
ranked higher, because of the amount of newly found relevant
text?

[martinibuster]

Would the site be ranked higher? In my opinion, I would have to say that the search engine would have a greater inclination to understand your site to be about widgets if you have 100 more pages all about widgets. I don't really see it as "ranking" however.

Sorry if my first answer was a little short, but I wanted to make you think about what you were about to do. You have a good idea, and are moving in the right direction.

I'll expand on my first comment. When devising these pages, make sure that they are something that gives strong product information, helpful usage information, good description of why your product is the best and why they should be buying it from you.

Make the page read well, look graphically attractive, and be useful to the user... and seemingly incidentally be well optimized for good keyword phrases.

The best optimized pages do not have that optimized feel. There are many badly constructed pages that are unattractive, have bady copy, no graphics... in short, they are there for the search engines but are very unattractive and useless to the human surfer. In that case, it doesn't help you at all.

The key then is to make the page good for the Search Engine, Beautiful and Useful for the Surfer and everybody's happy.