Ideal Page Size?

How many words should each page have in google?

[netnerd]

I see some site with onlhy 100 words in the top ten, and others with over 500.

How many words should my page have and what keyword density?

[tigger]

I normally try between 300-500

keyword density 5% - 10%

[victor]

It depends on what market you are in.

A website for an avante-garde electronic musican may have almost words at all -- just icons that play music. If that musician has a relatively uncomon name and a loyal fan following with websites linking to the musician's, two words may be enough to get a top ten listing.

So the important question is "top ten for what?" -- but check this site's posting charter as you may not be able to answer that.

[netnerd]

I mean a top ten for anything. Do you think that google has a different set of rules for different industries?

I want a rule that will work for the most compeitive ones.

[mattur]

In my experience NN, page size doesn't seem to be too important. I just focus on providing good, user-centred pages/info-architecture.

Two sites I do in the same competitive sector use two different styles: one uses concise, basic info pages (1pp) and the other uses longer more in depth info pages (2pp). Both have pages that rank in Google top 3, sometimes concise site comes above the more in-depth site, other times its the other way around.

On another site I have quite long (3-14pp) comprehensive article pages, which are long 'cos scholars often want to print them. These also rank v. well. All 3 sites are PR5/6. So I'd advocate designing to give your users what they want.
YMMV...

[netnerd]

Ok - two more questions then

What keyword density do you use? And do you aim to have the keywords near the start or spread through the text?

[dougs]

Netnerd

We aim for 250-300 info words per page, plus headers etc.

Seems to work a treat.

Doug

[mattur]

NN I have no idea what keyword density any of my pages have. I try to make the pages well structured, and since a page about blue widgets will, for user centred design reasons, have title(s) mentioning blue widgets and mention blue widgets fairly often (naturally) in the text, I leave it at that :)

IMHO it's important to have copy that flows, and a goal, rather than achieving a specific word density. Most of my pages follow a structure like: title, description paras, feature lists, call to action, and related page links. Then again, I've found simple parts lists pages can also work well for part number search results. I personally don't think there is a magic formula.

[ciml]

Last time I looked at density, I got the strong impression that the word occurance mattered more than the density; in other words page lenth didn't seem particularly important.

[netnerd]

Yeah - im never sure whether to go for a set number of occurances or a density. I have found that working with 450 words a page works , but its often difficult to fill the page out to that without it looking messy.

[whiterabbit]

Hi netnerd, WPG recommends pages for google to have a total word count from 259 to 543...how valid this is i'm not sure, but it seems like a reasonable pair of figures... :-)