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My question is, is there a minimum number of pages a site should contain? I've got plenty of good content on the main index page, along with some articles about "widgets" that will be linked from the index page.
Is it ok to have only 2-3 pages within a site?
Thanks.
No matter what your product there are plenty more pages you can produce that will generate search engine traffic.
Start by some keyword research, and then have a read through this thread [webmasterworld.com] ...which has some ideas for making small sites bigger.
More the pages you have the more chances your website has coming up, its been working for me. I have a website thats less then 2 months old and has over 3500 pages, almost all are in the index. All the main pages have to do with "widgets" and the subpages have to do "blue widgets, green widgets, red widgets" and their subpages has to do with "big blue widgets, small blue widgets". It bring me over 7000 visitors a day, but that depends on the demand in your market. Just make sure every page has quality content and your pages are clean and optimized, and i'll be surprised how it turns out. As I said earlier my website is not even 2 months old yet and was just added in the last update.
P.S. Sometimes it better to hit on a bunch of small keywords first then hit on the bigger keywords more once your established.
[edited by: dnbjason at 5:49 pm (utc) on July 15, 2003]
The site has been in the development stages for about 6 months, but was released online in late May.
Here is how most the pages were developed.
1.We generated a detailed database of information for few a hundred different "widgets".
2.Then for each "widget" we generated 8 different pages from our database:
"widgets for sale", "widget information", "used widgets" etc.
3.All the pages that were generated were optimized for the topic of that page: example:"British Green Widgets For Sale", "British Green Widget Inforamtion". They were also crossed link to the other 7 pages on that topic that was generated. For easy navigation and anchortext links.
4.The remaining pages are the listings/ads visitor placed on thoses pages for: "British Green Widgets For Sale"
Does that clear it up some? Saves alot of work by doing all the pages manually. Plus it easy to regenerate all the pages if you want to change your optimization method.
If you have 1 000 products then you will have 1 000 or 2 000 pages on the site, but it seems pointless generating masses and masses of near-similar content on hundreds of pages. Is that really useful to surfers? Darn it, beginning to sound like an ODP editor.
The keyword phrase I am targeting only has 3,000+ sites utilizing the exact phrase, but had 10,000+ searches last month. It's a very specific 3-word key phrase.
I wan't the site to FOCUS on that keyphrase and the product related to it (thats why I registered a domain of the keyword phrase).
Offering other products won't do my audience much good if they come to the site looking for something as specific as the 3-word phrase.
Anyone care to elaborate more?
You are right. I was referring to very focused site as mentioned in the original post. I had very few pages (~10-20), all with entirely different content, in mind. :)
Currently I find it easier to design one page for each exclusive phrase. Maybe, after experience, I will know how to design better.
Let's say your base term is the seemingly omnipresnt widget. You might have a page for
New Widget
Old Widget
Buying a Widget
Selling a Widget
Servicing a widget
Storing a Widget
Widget Parts List
Not to mention a the various color coded Widgets and there proper care and feeding. etc.
Is that really useful to surfers?
An excellent question that should be part of the design process.
With this level of competition, having the title and h1 tag same as the keyword you are targeting will most probably bring you to the first page with any decent link. Just one page is good enough.
Since you mentioned that your domain name matches, maybe even the title and h1 tags need not meet this requirement!
I'd say it can be useful to surfers in certain circumstances. If you have a number of different sized blue widgets, then, in certain competitive fields its perfectly legitimate to optimise a site for blue widget variants.
Can't be a lot wrong with giving searchers relevant pages can there?
Sure, it would be great to have one page all about blue widgets and their different attributes that ranked well on a variety of terms across the SE's - the reality is such pages are few and far between, if not non existent. :(
I just think that if you dont hone your pages and zero in on what you think your users require then you face the prospect of being found on page 20.
Its a shame, but if you do not have a pr 8 or pr9 with 1000's of variant kw ibl's, then imho you stand little chance of getting anywhere near page 1 or 2.
(sorry if ive stated the obvious - its late and my beer tastes good ;))
that being said. say there are under 5 phrases that you know really work. there are certain keywords you've identified that have conversion rates much higher than others.
if you have a 2000 page site are you not distributing pagerank throughout, in effect diluting each page? whereas with a 10 page site, you're really concentrating it on terms you know you want.
i say this because i've noticed certain barriers with larger sites than small. I have a few pr5 7-8 page sites that have much smaller incoming links than two of my pr4 large sites. In practice I've found it much harder to boost big sites. Is this way off? I was under the assumption that each page had it's own pagerank to "distribute" but the effort bump a large site up vs a small one tells me differently.?
The traffic comparison between the sites doesn't even compare though, it's true, bigger is always better ;)
Generating that many pages almost starts sounding like spam when I have a one-page site that is #2 for some two keyword phrase in SERPs of 110 000 results.
Well my main keyword "widgets" brings up almost 9 million results in Google and is in the top 50 keywords. For my keyword going into that kind of brake down of pages is well needed. It may sound spam but is not in no way. I have received ton of emails telling me how easy and well orginized my website is. Going into that kind of detail on certain topics is need in some cases.
All I know is I'm ranked in the top 100 for that keyword the first time getting in the search engines. So I must be doing something right. I'm diffently NOT spamming.
For instance:
In my case, it would be
widget-templates.com/widgets.htm optimized for "widgets"
widget-templates.com/wudgets.htm optimized for "wudgets"
widget-templates.com/index.htm optimized for "widget templates, widgets AND wudgets" or just "widget templates" for which the domain is named?
Hope this isn't too confusing :P
Also another question for the pros: If the url widget-templates.com is located in the H1 tag, does that count as a keyword placement, or just a URL?
Thanks for the great discussions.
In short is goes like this
Main page
widget-widget.com- page title matches most used keyword,
lots of general content about the service/product that
changes weekly using the major keywords and some listed
in the secondary pages.
Secondary pages
widget-widget.com/widgetrestoration
widget-widget.com/widgetvalues
widget-widget.com/bluewidget - very detailed information
with page titles and keywords to match.
Condensed content matching what people actually look for
is really king in my case, according
to my records many odd secondary keywords might only get
used 1/2 dozen times a year and are not worth maximizing
several pages for. Keep a weekly check on search terms and
change your pages to reflect ' the flavor of the week".
