SEO - Multiple Web Pages Beat Long Web Pages

In contrast with the printed word, which has been around for thousands of years, the web page has only been around for ten years. We're highly influenced by printed word user interfaces like books, magazines and newspapers, and our relationship with the printed word often causes us to make our web pages longer than they need to be.

Web surfers move from one web page to the next by means of hyperlinks or search engines, meaning that a web developer has little control as to what pages a visitors sees and in what order. They move quickly, barely glancing at most pages, reading only snippets of text from others.

What Do Search Engine Spiders Need?

Search engine robots are a lot like web surfers in that they don't need tons of text on a web page in order to determine its content and rank it properly. They seem to be content with blurbs of text rather than requiring comprehensive content.

Because search engines and web surfers work the way they do, it only makes sense to give them what they want. Instead of putting 1000 words of content on a single web page, consider splitting the content up across two, three, or even four pages. The benefits to splitting up content are numerous:

• Search engines index 4 pages instead of 1. This means your chances of showing up in the SERPs increase
• The content of each page will most likely target keywords more directly than the full content on a single page, more highly optimizing each page for particular keywords
• 4 pages linking to each other means that you are likely increasing the total amount of PageRank for your site.
• Web surfers tend to scan and read snippets of text, so by splitting up your content over 4 pages, you are structuring your content for the surfer, making it more user-friendly.

Split Big Web Pages into Multiple Smaller Web Pages

Splitting up content is a fairly straightforward concept. Just make sure that you split up content logically and that you provide navigation to allow a visitor and a search engine robot to move easily from any one page in the series to another. This will also help take care of internally linking the new pages to disperse PageRank.