Long Pages vs. Many Pages

[Johnnie111]

Hello! Not sure if this is the place to post but it seems topical...
For search engine optimization, and user experience, what is the general concensus on using really long pages vs. breaking it up into many pages.
I can understand that if you want to boost page views, you may want to break up long content into many pages, but is this better or worse for both search engine ranking and user experience.
Is there some optimium page length for websites?

 

[King X13]

personally when i do web design i go by what makes sense. dont split up info for the sake of splitting it up, if its relavant keep it together. dont put to little or too much on one page. navigate your site and see how it feels before you publish it to the web.

 

[Kubel]

For SEO, longer is better (as long as total page size remains small)- but you want to put your relevant keywords in the first 500ish words.

For user experience, I personally would rather see different topics separated into different pages than have to scroll forever or use named anchors to navigate one page. It's hard to say how much is good. I think it depends on graphics, whitespace between paragraphs, font size, style, etc...

 

[penfold]

I prefer to have things split up a bit, too. It makes it less visually cluttered to have things separated out some.

 

[sam2698]

Hi, for me, i usually have content on all one page. If i am posting a tutorial, or instructions that are particularly lengthy, i would break it up and continue it on other pages. It depends on the content and webmaster's views.

Hope this helps.

 

[Snake-Eyes]

Personally, i enjoy reading websites with smaller, but more pages.

 

[Phrantic]

There's not much difference. If you have many small pages, you will get many listings in search engines and your site will turn up with more different search critieria. If you have a few long pages, these will be accessed more and receive a better ranking in search engines. In the end, it's the amount of content on the website as a whole that will make the difference.

First and foremost I'd go with what is most logical for the website, and then bother about search engine ranking. There are plenty of other ways to get nice rankings anyway. Going for short and many pages or long and few pages will depend on your type of website. An informative website with many topics and sub-topics will most likely run best with many small pages that fit on the screen without needing to scroll. A site with a database like this forum will work with longer pages because all similar posts have to be grouped for the site to work better.