SEO Blog

Following on from yesterday’s post on content vs. Links for a new website I received an interesting question from regular contributor, Chad Walls, relating to the amount of content required on each page. Well, there’s no one size fits all answer to this, but let’s take a quick look.

First and foremost you need to have a page set up for each product and category on the site. This will provide you with the basic framework from which to optimise. The more pages you have, the more terms you can target; however, that doesn’t mean that you should get carried away. So How many words does each page need?

An SEO purist will probably tell you that a page needs at least 300 words on it. There’s an element of truth to this too. The more content that you have on a page, the more context that you can create for your primary keyword. However, by writing expansive content you run a number of risks.
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Where SEO is involved, content can be a hugely influential factor in where you rank and how easily the search engines are able to identify the target phrases for your page. Using that principle therefore, long copy would probably be the automatic choice – at least where optimisation is concerned. But it isn’t always that simple.

First and foremost, your content needs to reach out to your visitors. If you can’t grab their attention and provoke a reaction then it isn’t doing its job. But that doesn’t necessarily rule out long copy as a solution.

Your page needs as much content as required to provide all of the necessary information. You shouldn’t feel curtailed by the need to cut it short of 200 words and you certainly shouldn’t feel like you have to over elaborate to the extent where you’re shoehorning in phrases to reach 1,000.
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It doesn’t matter how deep they may be in your site, a landing page is an opportunity for you to pursue new keywords and search engine rankings. Whilst you can easily go overboard and have hundreds of pages about, well, not a lot really, if you’re after a new keyword and don’t want to shift the focus of an existing page, a fresh, unique page can provide the answer.

So what might you target? Well, if you’ve got a few categories covering lots of different products, you might want to consider splitting these it into more manageable chunks. By developing related sub-sections you can make it easier for people navigating around your site, uncluttered overpopulated categories and also provide a fresh gateway to your site.
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Webmaster Tools, just like a good analytics package, can help you to see your site through the eyes of a search engine. It won’t tell you when if your design is ugly or content is poor, but it will give you a heads up when errors start to creep in.

So, on the day that Bing released their revised Webmaster Tools programme, I thought it would be worth discussing some of the benefits for your site and SEO efforts.
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Content is probably one of the few constants across all sites. However, the one thing that is far from constant is the quality of said content.

Some people are able to get it just right. They reach out to their audience, provide them with clear instructions and information before convincing them to convert. Others though do not.

I’m not going to lie to you though, writing content isn’t easy. If it was, we’d all be professional Copywriters right? So knowing what is and what isn’t acceptable is probably the best place to start before trying some yourself.
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The work of an SEO is never over. Not only does a site require continual development in order to stay competitive, but the techniques and best practices update with equally frequent regularity.

It isn’t something that you need to be nervous of, but awareness is certainly a benefit. Search engine optimisation isn’t a linear story. Whilst there is a beginning, the middle and end are elusive. This is why it is so important to keep your SEO fresh.

By fresh, I mean you can’t get stuck in a groove. Yes, you might have been doing some great SEO work that has always gotten you results in the past, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll have the same good fortune going forwards.

Search engines and their algorithms are changing, which in turn influences how we optimise them. Most adjustments are only very slight and won’t make a jot of difference to how you perform SEO. However occasionally these small alterations build up and create something more substantial. This is where keeping an eye on industry commentary can be a real benefit.
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