Forum Moderators: phranque
Of course I want a high page ranking, but I can’t find any unambiguous guidance on max size, or max repetition of key words. The site is a cookbook review site, so there are lots of occurrences of “food”, “cookbook”, “chef”, and so on, which also appear in the meta keywords and meta description tags.
Is there a risk of appearing to be “stuffed” with keywords, and therefore penalized, just because it’s a big page?
If I thinned material out to another page, my Home page would then lack the keywords to be found by searchers for the individual books – how should I address the dilemma of lots of content versus search engine optimization?
I’d appreciate any help, to set me on the right road! Thanks.
If I thinned material out to another page, my Home page would then lack the keywords to be found by searchers for the individual books
And that's fine, because each book should have it's own page anyhow. That's the page you want the search engine to send visitors to.
The page you described is huge.
this thread on speeding up your site [webmasterworld.com] should have some useful tools and tips for you.
Great information by Souder - thanks for the link.
While I acknowledge that our home page is big, and that we should work to reduce it, the high penetration of broadband here in the UK means that size reduction/speed improvement is not our priority today - it's getting on the Search Engines' first pages!
So it's really about not breaking any of the barriers that might be imposed by search engines, on a page that's just lots of text and links, both of which can seem very repetitive to a crawler. If one of our meta keywords, "cooking", appears 80 times on the page, does that count for us, or against us?
With one cook book on a page you'd have 200 pages, and 200 chances to make it to the top of the serps.
If I have to choose between getting one chance, or getting 200 chances, I'd take the latter.
Big pages do work apparently, but they are probably more focused than what you are talking about, if I understand correctly.
If I write a 200k page about one cook book, that's one thing, and it might work well.
Writing a 200k page that covers 200 cook books is a whole different thing, it might work, but I wouldn't even consider it.
With each cookbook having it's own page you have a MUCH better chance of getting that page to the top of the serps.
First have the home page and keep that generic and far, far smaller than your current one. Have links coming off that page to around four or five other index pages. E.G. vegetarian books page, cakes books page, general cooking books page, meat books page.
Those four or five "index" pages have a short description of the subject then links to the book reviews that fall into that category. Each book review has its own page. Each book review page links back to the "index" page.
This way you get multiple chances at getting indexed. The home page should be aiming to get indexed for cook book reviews, the second level pages should aim to get indexed for a narrower subject (vegetrian / cake / meat etc book reviews) and the individual book review pages aim to get indexed for a particular book or its particular subject.
Keep those second level index pages in your top level directory along with the home page. The book reviews should be in their own (vegetarian, cake etc) indexes. This way the directory strucrure matches the subject structure and makes it easy for the googlebot to undestand what is going on.
Good luck.
