Know-How Exchange : Copywriting

Two thousand words on a page is WAAAAYY too long for a single page -- SEO or not.

Unless you are truly obsessive about playing to the search engines, you probably ought to make your website as helpful and easy to navigate as possible for the humans in your target audience. Often those pages are also most search engine friendly.

A couple of good rules to follow:

1. No page should be longer than two screens deep. Scrolling down more than once is a real turn-off to readers.

2. Every page should have some graphics, photos, or other visual interest that's relevant to the content. If all you have is words, it's just too much. It's not fun to read a bunch of gray copy ... no matter what the subject matter. The web is a visual medium.


This is not really from an SEO viewpoint, but what good is a website that gets high SE ranking and then turns off visitors when they click through?

P.S. If you haven't read Seth Godin's The Big Red Fez, you need to do that too.

Thanks very much for the advice. These are indeed articles people go to for the exact information. It could well be that my articles, which are pretty popular in the circulation marketing magazines I write for, are too long for publishing on the web. I can split them up into part 1, part 2, etc. if that would help. Ironically, I write about subscriptions marketing, and those that know the business will understand that long copy works best. So I am writing about, and showing, examples of long copy (the Gary Halbert kind - many, many screens to scroll down!). I am happy to give the link to one of these articles.

Many thanks for the advice - I can offer pdfs of these articles and also summarise them to keep some content on the website. I will keep the pdfs a manageable size.

Peter Hobday