How many pages should a site have?

jonesre · Joined: 29 May 2006 Posts: 11 Location: Alpharetta, GA

Typically, I'm sure the answer would be something like "It depends" or "as many as it takes, but no more."

But I'd like to get a feel for what is "normal" or what works. Let's say, for the sake of explanation (since I know nothing about it) that I've settled on Term Life Insurance for my keyword targeted site.

I've developed a list of 7500+ keywords that are pertinent to term life insurance; and I've taken that list and subdivided it into 16 tightly-focused groups that are sub-niches of term life insurance.

Beneath each of those 16 sub-niches, are two to 10 articles that directly address no more than two keyword phrases.

Is there some rule of thumb, or hard-won experience someone can share, which will tell me

"I find that my best performing niche sites range from "N" to "N+x" pages.

OR

"I have found that when a site is bigger than "N" pages "or so," the niche, or the keyword may be too general.

Thanks for your help,

Ron Jones[/i]

Will · Joined: 26 Feb 2006 Posts: 148 Location: UK

I don't think one can generalise to such an extent.

It does depend! A single page website with a squeeze page isn't going to do great in organic search listings, but then you might be driving paid traffic to your site so it won't matter.

If a truly massive website suddenly appears on a search engine's radar then that might trip some alarms - have you considered starting with a small website and growing it over time?

Who's your audience?

What are you hoping to achieve?

richerbrat · Joined: 12 Feb 2006 Posts: 137

Definitely start small and add as much content as you can as often as you can to rank better with SE's. I know I encountered a lot of teething troubles with my site layouts early on, and I wasted heaps of time changing them because one of the sites was huge, and the navigation was poor.