Tips to getting results for pages with little content

[agerhart]

I'm sure that people joining in on this thread must have thought that I was going to enlighten everyone with some good stuff.......sorry about that.

The truth is that I am doing a VERY important job right now, and the site itself is going to have minimal content. I have been researching different ways to get good rankings while having little content, and I haven't really found that much. Alot of the sites that I work on are for artists, hence the low content and many images. Any insight on this topic would be appreciated.

-A Gerhart

[JamesR]

Well, the keyword tag does count like any other text on some engines. Keywords in title tag is important. Are you talking music artists or artist artists?

[agerhart]

Artists artists, all kinds though, ceramics, painting, sculpture, etc.

So you think it would be beneficial to utilize the meta keyword tag as space to get textm content into the site?

[JamesR]

Well, that is one way but it may be a bit tough to do well on anything competitive (artist's names should do fine unless very popular). Another way is to get keywords in link text from another site pointing to different relevant pages on your site. That will help it show up under whatever keywords. It is a bit tricky to control though, you would have to feed the other webmasters custom links.

[agerhart]

I have heard that links are very beneficial to a site, but there has to be more that one can do for this type of situation.

For instance, for dynamic pages you can use a 1 x 1 frame and frameset, or server side include files to hide an asp driven page or something of the same nature.

There must be some more ways to get around the problem of little content.

[seth_wilde]

This is a pretty common problem. The most common solution would probably be cloaking (using IP's and UA's to serve the user a picture rich page while serving the SE a text rich page).

Other common solutions used would be hidden frames and overlapping layers.

[agerhart]

I have been debating on whether or not I want to even step into the world of cloaking......does cloaking work well. Better than using the no frames, or hidden frames? The concept of cloaking seems sensible and logical, but I am just wondering if it is the most applicable.

[JamesR]

From my experience with working with frames (not overlapping, just normal noframes content), cloaking would be more beneficial. I think noframes content is going to become more of a target for SEs to weed out spam.

[agerhart]

Thank you for letting me know of the possibilty of the SE's not liking the noframes usage.

In your experience, have you ever seen the SE's catch on to cloaking?

[rogerd]

Agerhart, cloaking is certainly one way to go that will give you lots of control. Perhaps the greatest risk with cloaking is that a competitor detects what you are doing and reports you. SEs have also used check bots with different IPs and agent names to try to smoke out cloaking, but this doesn't seem to be a high priority activity right now.

One thing to consider is whether you can legitimately include more text, even with artistic sites. For example, you can put up information about the artists, summaries or reprints of critical reviews, history or background info, info about the media used, verbal descriptions of individual pieces, etc. This would be totally legit, and you won't have to worry about being "caught." Although I suppose visually impaired individuals are not your primary customer target, any such surfers would probably appreciate the text.

[Xoc]

Content, content, content. People pulling SEO tricks tend to lose sight of the fact that content rules, even non-text content. Put quality graphics on your site. Then get ODP and Yahoo listings based off your content. Create a themed site so that the various spidering engines get happy. Put enough text on the page so that a spider can figure out what the pictures are about. When they see ODP and Yahoo, they'll be happy to rank you well. Get incoming links--people are usually happy to link to a quality site--that will make Google happy.

Only after you have done all that, start thinking about cloaking and other tricks.

[tedster]

I have a couple sites that fall into this category. Low amounts of text can actually help, since one occurance of a keyword is immediately good density. AV right now seems to like the pages that are light on text.

Another trick I've tried which seems to help is having a more elaborate directory structure than might seem "natural" at first. I have the feeling that pages called "index" get better attention, so instead of domain.com/keyword.html I tend more toward domain.com/keyword/index.html