Building Content For Search

A few paragraphs of text can go a long way. For example, you could write a 1000-word essay and post 250 words across each of four pages and slather those pages with AdSense. That’s what conventional SEO wisdom tells us (at least, it’s advice still being given out in a popular SEO forum).

Personally, I wouldn’t hire anyone who suggested that kind of cookie-cutter optimization. If you have 1,000 words of text on you’re too cheap and lazy to put it all on one page because you want to optimize your AdSense revenues, you don’t deserve my eyeballs or anyone else’s.

Now, sometimes it’s okay to put 250 words of text on a page, or 100. When? When that’s all you have to say on a topic. But if you’re taking a 1,000-word article that was not written in four logical sections and dividing it across four pages, you’re doing it wrong.

Users come first. AdSense placements come last. Why? Because a well-written 1,000-word article is much harder to displace from the search results than the best-written 250-word article segment. Simply spreading your content thinly across multiple pages doesn’t accomplish nearly as much for you as creating as much content as is really needed to populate those pages.

When you’re defining your article requirements, if you really want to limit yourself to 250 words per page, then you need to write your articles so that they encapsulate specific points within the 250 word limits. Don’t break the reader’s line of thought by inserting a page continuation link. Let the reader know that a real transition is about to occur.

But it would better to resist the urge to break up a single article. You get more value by creating value than by milking value. Search engine optimization works best when it is transparent, not when it is obviously fishing for clicks on advertising.

A complete thought makes a better impression on people than an incomplete thought. A complete argument persuades more people than an incomplete argument. If the purpose of your copy is to compel and persuade people to take a specific action, then keeping their eyes focused on the page until they perform that action or get disgusted and go away is the best thing you can do for yourself.

Which means that AdSense optimizers won’t provide valuable content. They want user eyeballs to wander off the topic as quickly as possible, gambling on the probability that the users will click on an advertisement rather than simply close the browser window (most people will just close the browser window, of course).

Long content makes sense if you have enough to say that you need a lot of words to say it. If you just want to make a quick point, however, then don’t bother dragging it out for “search engine optimization”. Half of the optimization process is pleasing the people who do the searching.