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While SEO becomes more and more important, people try to find angles that they can exploit or take advantage of so that they can achieve good rankings. In one specific instance, High Rankings forum post asks if there's a minimum number of pages that need to be targeted to achieve decent rankings.
It's important to note that in general, a site as a whole is collectively not ranked. Each page ranks individually. Therefore, you need as many pages as possible to say what you need to say in a manner that is understandable by your visitors.
Of course, this means doing keyword research and then writing content in such a way that benefits the visitors in as many pages (or as few pages) as possible. There's no set number.
But what about theming? Does Google look at similar pages and throw a site in a single category? It's an ongoing debate, where some people say that Google does this, while others say that they don't.
In general, it's agreed upon by all to perform diligent keyword research and to write from the start with keyword phrases in mind.
Comments:
Michael Martinez
06/30/2008 04:02 pm
Size (of site) doesn't matter. However, larger sites can leverage their internal links and content to build reinforcing contextual relationships between their pages. At the least you can give yourself some link anchor text. At most you can create your own hub-expert system. Either way you can help search engines see which pages are most important for a given topic on your site. Getting small sites to rank takes the same amount of effort as getting large sites to rank. You have to show the search engines you're more relevant to the user query than other sites. With smaller sites, however, you're more likely to need links in competitive queries -- and that may be where a lot of people leave themselves open to poor judgement.
tobto
07/01/2008 09:25 am
In fact 1) sites are maden for humans, not for crawlers 2) min quantity of pages based on quality of info delivers 3) quality of content defines min efforts for delivering
Sari
07/01/2008 02:30 pm
Nice post, and definitely relevant to a project I'm working on, but the link to the continuing thread seems to be missing. Care to reshare?
Rob Abdul
07/01/2008 09:01 pm
All things being equal, I'd aim for 12 pages as a minimum.