More or less text?
March 12th, 2007 by Joost SchrierThe people that have to deal with the contents of a website invariably come across one of the most annoying dilemmas around.
On the one hand they need to write clear, concise and short texts because the people that visit the website in question want to know what’s going on in an instant. They don’t want to read pages and pages of text if they don’t have to. On the other hand; the search engines need text to be able to figure out what your website is about and the more text there is, the more they have to form their ‘opinion’ and the more words you might be found with. So, how do you deal with this.
The general way of dealing with this dilemma is to try to satisfy both parties and, even more importantly, not to ‘annoy’ either of the parties. Some content managers make very short pages with “read more” links and others create longer pages with a summary in the beginning and a longer explanation below. Both forms have something going for them, although we prefer the second way of handling content.
Besides this, it would be wise to consider the audience. If you cater your website to a specific group of people who are actually interested in what you have to say (as opposed to people you want to sell something to) you can make your texts longer because your audience will read what you write until the last syllable. If you want to sell something to a ‘casual’ passer-by on the other hand you need to grab his/her attention quickly and guide him/her in the right direction fast. So, for this group you need a short page or a catchy summary of what you want to say.
