The Topic and Focus of Your Web Pages Impacts Your Organic Search Results
Content & Page Focus
Are you ready to learn one of the biggest secrets to having great content and excellent
organic search performance on Google? Here it is:
One Page, One Topic.
Maybe this little secret doesn't sound very profound, and I must admit that it is pretty
obvious, but for some reason when people start working on their web pages, they miss this
point and try to cover too much information on a single page.
Focused, Detailed Pages Show Up First
The more focused a web page is on a specific subject, the more likely it is get first page
search results on Google. If you are trying to create a web page that appeals to everyone
and is very broad in its subject matter, you are out of luck, and that page probably won't
drive much traffic to your site.
Aside from simply overlooking the "One Page, One Topic" rule, there is another reason why
people create web pages that try to cover too much information, or in SEO terms, try to
target too many keywords on a single page. Because creating highly specialized web pages takes a
lot of work since your website might need to have 50 web pages instead of 5.
I can't blame anyone who is building a website without the help of
an SEO friendly CMS for being reluctant to manually create and maintain 50 or 100 different
web pages! Get a good content management system and you will have a much easier time
maintaining your website as it grows.
An interesting ramification of creating pages that are focused on very specific topics is
that you are forced to get into the real "nitty-gritty" type of information about that
subject or else your page will be extremely short and not really say anything useful.
By digging deep into the subject of your page, you will be doing several things that
will help improve your search result placements on Google as well as your Google PageRank.
From a keyword and indexing point of view, having detailed content will help your page
show up ahead of other pages because it is more likely to contain the words and phrases
that people are going to be searching on.
In the previous discussion about page title, the
emphasis was on getting a title that accurately describes your page's content and has a
fairly strong topic focus. If your page really gets into the details and issues of your subject,
it will contain lots of keywords and key phrases that are related to the subject, sometimes making the
page title seem kind of generalized in the end. If that is the case then you should consider breaking the
page up into 2 or 3 pages with more focused titles.
When people search on Google they are usually looking for detailed information about the
subject that interests them. They don't want to read a bunch words that in the end
don't help them answer the questions that they have. By making your webpages very detailed
and informative on a particular topic, you are giving the user what they are looking for.
Giving people the information that they want has a tendency to make them happy and
gives them a reason to like your site enough to come back again. They might tell their friends
about your site, or put a link to it on their own website, or write about your site on a
blog. This is the basis of the PageRank scoring system, and consequently is the goal of every website owner.