Blog SEO techniques

Limiting entries in index page better?

[silverbytes]

Blogger alows to set up to 100 entries in your blog index page, that means you can have a huge page with up to 100 articles just in one page. I wonder if it's better to keep that number low enough in order to get a good keyword density and not mix keyword targeted articles making the index weaker to search engines....

[caveman]

Actually, if the theme of the site is clear and consistent, it strikes me from a pure mathematical standpoint that the index page is more likely to keep a constant mix of appropriate kw's with more articles than fewer articles. Think about it; if there are only five articles on the homepage, the likelihood of the kw mix bouncing around is much greater; that effect is greatly smoothed out when more articles are present, and the articles remain longer as well.

OTOH, if the site is so narrow that the same kw's appear in article after article, over and over again, it probably doesn't matter much. In the end, as is true in most cases, I'd do what I thought made the site best for users. That will get you the most readership and inbound links, and should win out in the long run.

My 2 cents.

[silverbytes]

I'd say the more articles the less specific targeted keywords. As it is easier to get a good density in a few than try to keep it in hundred or dozens of articles (you can't talk about the same thing over and over).

Does the regular meta tags work for Blogger in keyword and description?
<meta name=keywords content="bla">
<meta name="description" content="bla">

[caveman]

> I'd say the more articles the less specific targeted keywords.

Well, again, that can be true, or not; it depends on the nature of the blog, and of the category. Personally, I always go for more complete coverage of a topic. It is a common mistake to think in terms of just one or two kw's or kw phrases for a page. Most of our pages, on most of our sites, do far better than the "average" page, precisely because of catching loads of longer tail searches. Well thought through link strategies and on-page optimization can greatly enhance a page's overall abilitty to rank for a large number of search queries. Especially on blogs, there is very little reason to be self-limiting.

[wmuser]

I would post a few articles on one page max because if you post too many SE will be lost determining what is that page about

[caveman]

> if you post too many SE will be lost determining what is that page about

Nah. ;-) Lemme see...the SE's have the page title, the META info, onpage text, Hx, images, internal nav links, internal text links, and (hopefully), lots of external backlinks. Most of those things will get the SE's far along towards the major kw's that you want to rank for, assuming you manage the site's affairs well. And presumably, the main kw's you want the homepage to rank for will consistently be present also.

If you then take into account things like LSI and/or related semantic evaluation by the SE's, and how the algo's work (especially G's), then it will come clear that having kw variation by virtue of freshly appearing content that remains for a while on the homepage is not a bad thing ... and quite possibly a very very good thing. Keep in mind too that the SE's have consistently trended towards de-emphasising onpage factors over the past couple of years. ;-)

To be clear, I'm not advocating a 100 article homepage. But IMHO, the issue is not because of kw concerns. The issues that come most to mind include load time, link credit limitations, and scrolling issues. I certainly would not, however, be concerned with having 10 or perhaps even 20 article blurbs on the homepage ... especially when they all feed off to the complete articles on subpages.