Lots of pages but little with text content

Should I care doing all pages?

[Macguru]

I came across this new site with about 20 decent pages with good text content. All other pages (+ 150) are with a main jpg of the products and nav gifs burried in nested tables and no text at all.

Will my client benefit of anything you know if I make a balanced and relevant use keywords in titles, descriptions, filenames, alt and comments here and there?

[4eyes]

I think so MacGuru.

I have a client with a 200 page site. Many of his pages are simply an image, some with a bit of text describing the particular product on that page, some without.

Before I took over the site, none of these pages had proper titles, keywords or descriptions. All I did was give them individual titles with the product name + info and added a generic description for each product category.

That was the only optimisation I did, but the hits to the site increased dramatically. Every page is found 1 or 2 on Google for the product name and many are found for the generic description. Over half the traffic now comes from these 'simple' pages. In this case it is because none of his competitors could be bothered to correctly title 180+ individual product pages.

Well worth doing for him.

Depending on the market, it might be worth adding a generic summary, (sort of 'byline'), to the bottom of each page just to get a bit of text on there.

[added]
Forgot to say, the site structure is such that every 'simple' page has a text link coming to it with the main key phrase for that page. I think that the link and having a correct title are often enough for this type of page.

[Macguru]

4eyes,
Your reply is very encouraging! For the time it takes to do this for each page, I think it is very profitable.

Just another question: Does any think that using the main keyword in different zones for those "empty" pages will reinforce the theme of the site? Did the "ordinary" pages did any better by this technique after a while?

[added too] Ok, main nav is with rollover gifs all over the site. Should I use hallway pages for the text links??

[Robert Charlton]

>>Ok, main nav is with rollover gifs all over the site. Should I use hallway pages for the text links??<<

I can't comment on the hallway page, but I do use text links on the bottom of every page. I think this is good navigation practice anyway, and it certainly helps in search.

I recently ran an experiment on a client's site, where they didn't think it would matter if they changed a few words of my copy here and there ;)... including the text links. Rankings were dismal. Instead of changing it back all at once, I decided to do it in steps, to see how individual components helped (on Google). The first step was fixing the text links only... and I can say that just including part of the target phrase (eg, "widgets" as part of "red widgets") in the global text links has jumped the page from #34 to #3.

[ken_b]

Hmmmm.... I've been wondering about this. I have maybe 1,000 pages that have a generic title (if any). The are all just a photo with a one line description.

Looks like maybe I should go back and properly title them.

Would it be effective if I just copy/paste the description as the page title?

[Macguru]

Hi ken_b,

I did not have the occasion to welcome you to WebmasterWorld. I hope you like this place, tons of info.

>I just copy/paste the description as the page title?

Funny you ask this question, I did the same a couple of days ago. I used the "site search" feature (top menu) to get the thread back. Here it is:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[4eyes]

I would guess so. Although it would help if there was a generic description in there somewhere

e.g.

If site has some pages with scanners, some with printers etc

Page is for 'Acme Super 3500 Scanner'

Title =
Acme Super 3500 Scanner, specification and price'

Description =
Acme Super 3500 Scanner, from 4Eyes Ltd, specification and price

Page is for 'Bloggs Cheapo 200 Scanner'

Title =
Bloggs Cheapo 200 Scanner. specification and price

Description =
Bloggs Cheapo 200 Scanner, from 4Eyes Ltd, specification and price

Thats pretty much all we did and it works OK because nobody else selling the 'Bloggs Cheapo 200 Scanner' could be bothered to do the same.

[ken_b]

Macguru; Thanks for the welcome. I did use your link to read the other interesting thread, and the "slide show" reference really struck home. That's pretty much what I've got.

4eyes; Right now the pages I have titled say something like.... xyz at sitename.com

The image on the page is of something I photo'd at an event. On the page is the event name and the desriptive name for the photo.

would it be more effective to change my titling to drop the site name and include the event name? Like....

xyz at event name.

[4eyes]

Titles are the most important part of the page to get your main key words in.

If you want the page to get found for 'event name' and 'xyz' make sure they are both in the title.

If you can get them in the description, body text and links to the page, so much the better.

Given that we are talking about phrases which are low competition, they only need to be 'minimally' optimised.
I have had low competition pages in the top ten based only on the title.