On long page, or many short pages

[vovonhi]

First the Question:

For the purposes of SEO, is it better to have one very long page with lots of content, or to cut that page into many shorter linked pages (ie page 3 of 30, next, back, first, last, etc)



Now the Background:

I am going to post an academic paper on the web, and want to optimize it to be found by the search engines. I am going to post it in HTML with a download option (PDF), and was wondering how to structure the HTML portion. The overall document is about 30 pages.

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[culanlua]

Hi Rob,



I think you should aim at 300-400 word pages interlinked with your keywords in the link anchor text (not "Next", "Back" etc). More pages with 300-400 words will be better in terms of SEO than one large page. Split your paper in natural main sections and put each on a page. That way you will also be able to have individual page titles, meta tags etc. beside the gain from the interlinking. This will all give you better ranking. Structure each page in natural smaller sections and use h1, h2 and h3 tags for headings/subheadings.

Doing this you will please both your visitors and Search Engines.

[hungtran]

Depends on how many keywords you want to be found on.



Also keep in mind G only looks at the first 100K. So IMO, chop it up in 100K chunks, optimize each bit for a different related keyword and get links to the various sections with the optimized kw's in the anchor text.

[greendays]

Quote:

So IMO, chop it up in 100K chunks

I will have to disagree there. 100K of text is a way more text than 300-400 words which I consider optimum. Chances are that the hole paper could fit in the 100K limit.

[macys]

Well, at least 100K chunks. Nielsen once said 80% of people don't scroll. I find it boring too. So IMO it's best to keep everything above the fold indeed.



3-400 doesn't allow for a great number of kw repetition with it staying readable though.



Anyway, it depends on many variables what is best. If it is a tough topic, then clear broken up point might be best. If you audience is well clued up on the matter then one page could be fine. Scrolling sucks though.