Is one paragraph enough?

[dickbaker]

I just launched a site that's aimed at a very competitive market. So, I'm going after the long tail keywords and phrases.

For some of these keywords and phrases, there just isn't enough to say about them to write a whole page. They're either acronyms or industry slang for other phrases.

What I've done is create pages devoted to these phrases. Let's say one is for "DWASFQ," which stands for Dumb Webmasters Asking Stupid Forum Questions. On the page is a short paragraph that explains the meaning, and then says, "for more information about Dumb Webmasters, visit our [link]webmasters[/link] page." The webmasters page is lengthy, and contains information about a more competitive keyword topic.

Is the short page enough for the search engines? I've never tried this approach before.

[blackmax]

I recently had a client in the competitive insurance market with similar issue. He didn't have more than a paragraph (and most of it was bullet points) for each page, but he rates really well for each. So long as the keyword theme is in your meta tags, H1's etc it seems to work for Google.

I have to add his site did already rank well for competitive phrases and I'm sure this helped with the new pages. I think he had a PR of 4.

[dickbaker]

Thanks for the reply, blackmax.

Again, I'm using these short pages that target the long-tail key phrases to send visitors to the very competitive keyword pages.

The notion of targetting the long-tail key phrases has been repeated here on this forum many times. So, I'm going to give this a try.

If the one or two paragraph pages don't work, then I'll have to re-write the pages for the competitive keyword phrases, but use the long-tail phrases in the title, <h> tags, keyword density, etc.

Again, though, the problem is that these long-tail keywords are either acronyms or industry slang. I can't imagine writing a page using such terms that would be easily understood by the average visitor.

In fact, I wonder if acronyms and industry slang terms will attract any visitors other than those who are either working within the industry, or simply those visitors who heard the terms at their buying session, but didn't understand.

[blackmax]

Your last paragraph is very valid. You might be able to rank really well for industry specific terms, but will they convert?

I am of the school of thought that the closer the user is to making a purchase, the more educated they are about the product/service, therefore they are more likely to type in the industry jargon and long-tail key phrases.

[dickbaker]

Blackmax, I guess only time will tell.

In this niche, the flurry of acronyms and industry slang are thrown out during the initial sales session, and then at the closing of the sale.

And the niche is so competitive that I have no illusions about getting on the first page of Google for the #1 phrases. At least not in the short run.

I've long believed in the idea of keyword divserfication, as in having so many possible combinations of keywords and phrases that some searcher is going to find my sites. The old phrase, "even a blind squirrel finds an acorn from time to time" comes to mind.

If, as you suggest, a paragraph devoted to a long-tail keyword or phrase can rank well, then I'll continue to create such short pages.

Nothing to lose but time, and everything to gain if I'm right.