Several short articles, or one long one?

[Jingo01]

This may be a very basic question...

In terms of the overall benefit to the SEO of a website, is it better to have, say, 4 pages about different aspects of the same subject (i.e. wooden lintels, steel lintels, concrete lintels and cavity lintels) or to have one page containing all the information?

I have a site with roughly 250 pages, which could probably condense down to almost half that. The vast majority of inbound links point to either the homepage or one of the 20-odd most vistited pages. Of those, 2 or 3 pages count for roughly 70% of entrances.

So should I concentrate on adding new pages, or improving/expanding the existing pages?

[DanDeceuster]

I suppose that is true, e-commerce and editorial sites will organize information differently. With e-commerce the last thing you want is to clutter a page with tons of products to make it difficult for users to find exactly what they are looking for. But with editorial sites like wikipedia it would make more sense to have the most comprehensive page you can create.

[kwoolf]

Sure Daniel, your example makes sense for an e-commerce site. The question above asked about "different aspects of the same subject," so I would write a thorough article about that subject, which I assume is an editorial here or Russ would have said product, that covers all aspects mentioned. Personally, I wouldn't want to click through a maze of pages to find the info I wanted; I'd like it right there in front of me. Just a preference here.

So I'm going to have to disagree with you about the 5 separate pages for 5 key words in this case. Granted, content for e-commerce sites like your example should be much more focused than a blog or review about a product, as there is a lot of SEO magic you can do with reviews using microformating and RSS, but if you're writing a tutorial or editorial, I'd go with a complete full page with those 5 key subjects organized in paragraphs with key words used in headings, bold text, image alt tags, anchor text, bullet lists, and content. The page rank would be much better than 5 separate pages.

[EGOL]

I would place my bets that Amazon's page won on the basis of domain authority.

[EGOL]

I have a number of long articles that were produced by merging the content of multiple short articles.  These single-page articles bring in a lot more total traffic than all of the short articles combined.  They pull that traffic because of the enormous diversity of words on the page but also because of higher overall rankings.

If you merge these lintel articles and produce a title tag like below, I think that the page will be a candidate for the "lintel" and "lintels" SERPs plus all of the subterms such as "wooden lintels"......

<title>Structural Lintels: Wooden, Steel, Concrete, Stone, Cavity</title>

Pages like this should have a general description of lintels at the top and then subheading paragraphs for wooden, steel, concrete, etc.  A menu of on-page anchor text links will be obviously displayed at the top of the page - much like you see in a long wikipedia article.  These on-page anchor links, in my opinion, have almost as much optimization power as a title tag.

I agree that a big page like this might not immediately rank as well as individual pages, each optimized for a single keyword.  However, these big impressive pages will attract links faster than several short articles.  Those links will power them to higher overall traffic and rankings in the long term - which is what I am playing for.

[DanDeceuster]

In your example, I believe a substantive page about lintels has a better chance to rank for the term lintel. However, if you want to rank for wooden lintel, steel lintel, etc. then you have a better chance with content targeted toward each keyword. Each of these pages would even link to each other.

That's my opinion though because I go after the long tail traffic. If you want to try and rank for lintels, then great, make a comprehensive page about them. But if you want to rank for something specific like wooden lintels, then you need a page about wooden lintels, not a comprehensive guide to lintels.

[DanDeceuster]

In your example, both Border's and Amazon have a page about the exact same subject. Amazon said more about the subject, so they won out in quality. This doesn't mean you have to spew all the information imaginable onto a page.

If you have 5 keywords, then 5 great pages of content are going to be much, much better than one huge page of content in achieving rankings for all 5.

Imagine I review fitness equipment. I want to rank for treadmills, ellipticals and exercise bikes. Is it better for me to clutter one page with as many reviews of every treadmill, elliptical and bike as I can? Of course not, I want my treadmills on one page, ellipticals on another, and exercise bikes on another.

But what I want to do is be as substantive and in depth as possible on each of those pages, not some superficial sentence or two. So while I believe you are right, large pages are good, you should not have large pages covering multiple topics and keywords. Go in depth on your one topic and rank for your keyword and its variations.

Back to my example, my treadmill page could rank for treadmills, treadmill reviews, treadmill ratings, best treadmills, home treadmills, etc. If my page covers treadmills, ellipticals and bikes it's definitely not rankings for all those treadmill terms. Targeted content wins, but like you and others are saying, it needs to contain substantial content.

[kwoolf]

Hum. I've watch videos from Matt Cutts and read in quite a few places that large pages win in SERPs. One comparison I'm sure you can find was between Amazon and Borders and how Amazon's page for the same product was over three times as long and contained 5x the content. Subsequently, it ranked higher than Border's page.

I create pages with relevant content, easy-to-read formating, descriptive images, and SEO recommendations from Google and SEOmoz. Takes me longer to get things done, but I'm pretty happy with my rankings.

[rodnic66]

What are the keywords you're optimizing for and what are other people with the same keywords writing?  Look for gaps where you can create unique content that contains your key terms.  That might result in a big rewrite, or some minor tinkering (probably not given only 20 of 250 pages are being found) or something in between.

It's also worth identifying the pages that drive most visitors to buy / get in touch / click ads / whatever.  Why are these pages more successful than the others?  Traffic that converts is the best traffic.

Hope that helps.

[EGOL]

I have lots of articles on websites and the ones that earn the most links, pull the most traffic and rank the highest in the search engines - for the most difficult keywords - are the ones with the most substantive content.

When I write an article about a subject I want the person to land on the page and say WOW!  - without having to read it.

In your example, if someone was writing an article about buildings and used the word lintel and wanted to link to a page that explained them, which do you think they would link to?  A short page about wooden lintels or a substantive page with descriptions and photos of many types of lintels?

[DanDeceuster]

More pages is better as long as you are not repeating yourself. This way you can make very targeted content for very targeted keywords. It would be hard for a page about wooden lintels, steel lintels, concrete lintels and cavity lintels to rank for for the term "steel lintels." However, if you have a page solely about steel lintels, its a lot easier to get rankings on that phrase.

The key is not to repeat yourself. You don't want duplicate content. Ehow got dinged on this in the Panda update and so did about.com because they would have two articles about essentially the same thing, like "how to use a screw with a flathead" and then "how to use a screw with a phillips head." techinically, they are slightly different, but they are essentially going to say the exact same thing except for the one detail about the shape.

So don't make a bunch of articles that are all nearly identical, but create as many pages as you can to get very targeted content.