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When I designed the site, I knew *nothing* about SEO. I've since read a few books, subscribed to this site, and done a lot of research. I'm now quite worried that my 70k-110k pages are going to lower my rankings. The pages load great over broadband connections but now I'm worried lol (especially after reading the 26 rules: [searchengineworld.com...] )
Does anyone here have experience w/ large pages getting promoted? Advice?
The breakdown of our pages is probably 75% of the page size is graphics. The site will have 400+ pages of good content but it is mainly descriptions of the content the user is downloading (the reason they came to us).
Why do you need 75% graphics?Because I like the way it looks and I own the company hehe. Like I said, I didn't know anything about SEO when I designed the site so I'm here asking for advice on dealing with what I have. already designed.
The download description will be very heavy in terms of the keywords my users will search for so I think there will be relevant content on the page for the engines to find.
I guess my question is also asking what my optimal page size should be if I'm *only* targeting Broadband users...
You need to try and split the pages up so that each is more tightly focused upon one subject, this helps with search engine ranking for that topic.
Yes I have experience of just this scenario!
Matt
avoid ultra complex nav systems that will get parsed before your textI have a pretty complex Javascript menu that I wrapped into an external file and call with the <script> tag in the HEAD. That should be okay, right? I read that I should be okay by doing it this way. I used SmartMenus menu from [smartmenus.org...] if that helps.
You need to try and split the pages up so that each is more tightly focused upon one subject, this helps with search engine ranking for that topic.I think I'm doing a good job of this now. What I have done is that each video has it's own separate .html page with it's descriptions. Each category has it's own separate page and each video series does the same.
My graphics are mostly ads for other parts of the site. I'm now worried that I've turned my website into a brochure instead of something functional lol. Everytime I show it to someone in my target market, though, they are absolutely blown away by the design and they can do everything they wish and find what they need. I'm just worried about the page size and the rankings...
Your other issue is: if you have 75% of your page in graphics - have you left enough words for the search engines to index meaningfully? This seems far more worrying than the overall size issue.
the bottom line is "do you get above the fold on the first page google for the search terms that you want? " .
If the answer is yes ..then leave well alone ..if "no" look at improving your links and optimising your texts before starting to cut out or play around with your layouts ..
Or make a "doorway page" in text only for every keyword/phrase you want to target ..however it's gonna be harder to get someone to link to an obvious doorway page than to an interesting page of text and images ..also google can ( depending on the wind direction at any given moment.. penalise doorway pages ) ..;)
Depends also on your niche as not all elements of what is known as the algo are applied with equal force to all niches ..
The old rule is not to let your page go > 100k, or the bots wont grab the whole page, and may not index it at all.Wow - that is such great info. Thanks! That makes me feel better - and it makes sense (how can SE's crawl an image outside of the ALT tag?). When people say, "Make your pages small so the SE's can index them", no one ever says that they are only talking about the HTML.
Bear in mind that this is the *HTML* size, not the page load size.
Your other issue is: if you have 75% of your page in graphics - have you left enough words for the search engines to index meaningfully?Hmmm - I don't know. Think of it like this - you are Columbiahouse.com and you sell CDs. You can only write in the page text the info that the publisher gives you about the CD - if the publisher gives you no info, you can only just put it up there ( like this - ).
When my publishers give me the videos, I only have as much to put on the page as I receive from them. My content will be nowhere near this sparse but it may only be 100 words describing the video (heavy on the keywords). I don't have time to watch 400 videos and write content - or should I *make* time?
the bottom line is "do you get above the fold on the first page google for the search terms that you want? " .I won't know that till we launch this Summer!
If the answer is yes ..then leave well alone
[edited by: pageoneresults at 5:19 pm (utc) on April 15, 2005]
[edit reason] Removed URI Reference - Please Refer to TOS [/edit]
The Pron industry is a perfect example of this effect in action .
When my publishers give me the videos, I only have as much to put on the page as I receive from them. My content will be nowhere near this sparse but it may only be 100 words describing the video (heavy on the keywords). I don't have time to watch 400 videos and write content - or should I *make* time?
ok, so you need to think about how else you can get words on to your site. Can you create a discussion forum? how about a place to leave reviews? Build the link structure carefully so the movie titles (or equivalent keyword-useful text) point back to your income-generating page and voila - you've improved the ranking of the site :)
