The Measure of a Website
The measure of a website is not in the number of pages but rather in the quality of the content- and that you even have one of course. You can have a relatively small website (5 pages or less) be extremely effective both from a branding standpoint, but also a conversion standpoint. We’ve seen this in landing pages for years, but when we are talking about a website, I am often asked how big should it be?
It’s a commonly held belief in the SEO industry that many pages = bigger success. This is often true when considering SEO rankings across multiple keywords. However, it seems like most things on the Internet, that trends are changing and that a good portion of a web site’s traffic is now coming from Social media. Unlike search engine traffic where you need to be indexed on multiple keywords, Social media doesn’t necessarily require that. It does however require an investment in time and energy participating in Social Media and that often requires multiple profiles. Profiles are generally free so… that makes a strong case for exchanging a website page for an active profile instead.
Another point I like to make is that too often people create website pages that consist of a single paragraph and a single photo. For me, this really isn’t much of a page and probably should be a blog post. Since most web pages could be theoretically infinity long there really isn’t much harm in building out some real content on a page. I would personally avoid a page that is ridiculously long and separate thoughts should probably be on separate pages. The point I am trying to make is that you can cut down on the number of pages required by combining multiple small pages into a fuller more complete single page (quality).
Taking that point a little further- there are some tricks to make a single long page look more concise. First, websites are much wider than before allowing more content on the page. Second, the use of tabs and accordion menus can also help organize a page so that it doesn’t have the appearance of looking long. Lastly, the use of pop-up windows can be helpful to display additional details without adding to the volume of the page. These aren’t your father’s pop-ups though- most now use an AJAX lightbox to display the content without spawning a new browser window. Please keep in mind, depending on the tool used, content displayed this way may not be indexed by the search engines thus negating the SEO benefits.
I generally tell poeple to have a home page, about us page, a contact page, and a page for each of their major product lines and/or services. This usually equals about a 5 – 10 page website to be both effective in the search engines. Add to this a blog or blog functionality in your CMS your website will look plenty big, acheive SEO results, and convert visitors into sales/leads!
