I was reading a competitor bookstore’s online newsletter the other day and it gave me an idea for a post. The newsletter went on and on and on. I scrolled, scrolled, scrolled down through the content and found myself deleting the email before reaching the bottom.
It’s not that the content was bad – it was actually really good (and it gave me some ideas for our own Boomerang Books Bulletin). It’s just that I didn’t have the time or the inclination to take it all in.
There’s a lesson in that for netpreneurs.
People’s attention spans are short these days. We have so many things impacting on our time - so many distractions, competing priorities, and the ever-increasing demands of everyday life. We just don’t have the time to read through a lengthy web page or email newsletter. And when we do have the time, we can’t possibly take in all that information, because our mind is full of so many other things!
So for our human visitors/newsletter subscribers, the advice is to employ the KISS principle - keep it simple, stupid!
There’s also another important consideration when reviewing the length of our web pages - will Google index all of the content if it is too long? Like most people in modern society, the Google indexing robots are busy little bees. They will only spend a certain amount of time on your website before moving on to the next site. If each page of your website contains a thesis, then much of the page content won’t be indexed, which means that your site won’t achieve its traffic potential from the search engines.
With that in mind, here are some tips for good page content:
- Keep each page or newsletter to 200-300 words maximum per page.
- If your content is more than 200-300 words, span it over multiple pages, but offer a ‘print version’ that contains the entire text (it’s painful having to print articles that span over multiple pages)
- Use bullet points, prominent headings, white space, 1.5 line spacing and short paragraphs to break up the content and enable the reader to ’scan’ your content. It’s proven that most people scan, rather than read.
- Include keyword combinations that you want to rank highly for in Google and other search engines, but make sure that they appear ‘naturally’ within the text (ie. when read, the text should read naturally)
- Put your best content ‘above the fold’ so that every visitor can see it – ie. it is visible once the page has loaded, without the necessity to scroll down to reveal the content.
- Cross-link to other appropriate pages on your website so that your visitors can find other content quickly and easily. Use contextual links (links within the body text, like this one!) to provide natural pathways throughout your website.
Of course, I am aware of the irony – this article appears on a blog page that scrolls and scrolls and scrolls. A consequence of using Wordpress, although I am sure that it could be configured differently…
Tags: content, google, keywords, page length, scrolling, search engines
Clayton,
I subscribe to your view. Being an old flack I reckon any more than one page of A4 text in very large font and you’re wasting your time. But I constantly read copywriting legends who say the ‘long sales page’, long email etc is the way to go.
Can we both be right when it comes to monetizing content?
cheers
Mark