Advanced SEO issues

I rarely post questions with regards to specific SEO practices. I feel I'm pretty experienced with SEO, based on a great foundation learned from Chris over the past 4 years, as well as lots of theoretical and brainstorming work.

I came to a dilemma when redoing my site http://www.surviveoutdoors.com. I will be specific to get the best input from whoever decides to post a reply to this.

This applies to many topics on my site, but I will discuss the content that brought this to my attention, mosquitoes. The issue has to do with splitting up content or keeping it all on one page. The sub topics would include "Mosquito Control" , "Mosquito Repellent" , "Mosquito Bites", and a few more. It gets complicated. If I put all this content on one page, perhaps do some embedded links through some table of contents, it would put quite a bit of content on one page that could be good for SEO. However, optimization would be difficult because what would I put in the <title> and page heading. All these topics merged into one title?

This is an issue I run across all the time. I would guess splitting it up would be best. It really depends on the topic and the sub-topics involved. Sometimes it should be split up into seperate pages, sometimes it should be compressed into one page.

If anyone has any interesting thoughts, I'd appreciate a reply. Thanks :).

I think the biggest issue when sub dividing pages is link structure. Whenever something is buried more than one link deep you start to have issues (or so I've found in my own experience.)

It's a tricky one. As I think the search engines value pages that are linked to from other related pages, this could be a potential benefit from splitting the content into seperate pages.

For example, having a page about mosquito's, with your main keywords. Then several other pages on sub topics: mosquito repellent, mosquito bites etc, all interlinked in a mesh type structure. I think this would create a kind of hot spot of related content pages. I'm sure the search engines would love that.

However, you need to keep in mind how competitive your main keywords are. If they're competitive and they need a lot of PR, then you might wanna keep the PR in one page, instead of splitting it into seperate pages. Then use a title tag like... "Mosquitoes: Mosquito Repellent , Mosquito Bites, Mosquito Control."

If I had enough PR then I would definitely split it into several different pages. If not, then I would keep it in the one page. Depends on how competitive the individual keywords are and how much PR they would need to get a good rank.

I would split them up so long as I had atleast 1 page of text (say 500 words at the minimum) on each subtopic.

To correct Chromate....

You wouldn't be "splitting" up PR. The pages will have roughly the same PR as they would have had as one page, only there will be one more application of the dampening factor.

In fact, if they're competitive its better to split them up as that way you can target each phrase with your title and anchor text.

Thanks, just wanted to get some more thoughts. I will continue to take it one topic at a time. Some topics I'll split up, others I'll merge.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Chris

You wouldn't be "splitting" up PR. The pages will have roughly the same PR as they would have had as one page, only there will be one more application of the dampening factor.

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I think you misunderstood what I meant. Collectively, yes you're right. But say, page A links to B, C, D & F. Pages, B & C would have more PR if page A only linked to them alone. So the PR does get "split" between the sub pages. Therefore, those pages may not receive enough PR in order to rank well.

What I meant was, it might be a good idea to keep the keywords in the main page (page A) as it has a higher PR. Depending on the linking structure of the site, you could still take advantage of keyword rich anchor text, if the page is linked to from different points throughout the site, each of which using different keywords.

I would assume you'd do horizontally linking across a category though, meaning b-f all link to each other as well.