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Optimizing with complex pages

Posted by Michael Martinez on January 14, 2008 in Content Theory

In terms of link relationships, there are three kinds of Web pages: those that link to other pages within the same “site”, those that link to other sites, and those that link nowhere. You should never create a page that doesn’t link out.

Every page on your site should link to at least one other page on your site. How many pages link to other sites doesn’t matter.

Now, that said, you can categorize Web pages as content-rich, link-rich, transitional, and complex. Both content-rich and link-rich should be self-explanatory. A transitional page lacks both content and link depth. Section headers, stub pages, and placeholders are transitional pages. I’m not talking about those temporary redirects you often see in sites where you fill out forms. A transitional page has to be static, has to be reachable through on-site navigation, and has to lead your visitors elsewhere.

Complex pages are hybrids, possibly being both content-rich and link-rich. A blog is more likely to contain complex pages than, say, a traditional business site page. An eCommerce site is more likely to contain a lot of transitional pages.

Complex pages are the best pages to have because they create a lot of on-page relevance, they are resources that link to other information, and they are most likely to attract natural inbound links (including your own internal promotional links). Complex pages usually require more time and thought to do right than other types of pages.

You embed your links directly in the main copy of your complex page. You include robust copy in your complex page. Many news articles and encyclopedic articles are complex pages because they are both content-rich and link-rich.

While it would be nice to turn out only complex pages, that’s not humanly possible. You usually run out of time, you run out of ideas, you get tired of investing so much effort into a single page. Complex pages are therefore the most difficult pages to create because they require more of your resources.

Hence, if you do a sloppy job of creating complex pages you’re wasting your effort. You should ensure that you know what you’re trying to accomplish when you set out to create a complex page. Don’t meander. Don’t wander. Don’t drift into multiple topics unless you’re very skilled at getting pages to rank for multiple topics (and keeping the reader’s attention).

Outbound links are distracting and if they lead to incongruous content they can be very annoying. You should pay more attention to the way you present your outbound links to your visitors than to the search engines because the search engines are not as intelligent as your visitors and your visitors are more likely to create links for you than the search engines.

The complex page can be your feature article, your white paper, your reubttal of someone else’s presentation, or the definitive explanation of how a process works. The complex page should not be a thinly disguised link list. If the point of the page is in fact to deliver a list of links then you should make the list interesting. Every link destination should be thoroughly described with resounding praise, scathing derision, or some entertaining anecdote that keeps the visitor reading.

The real trick to creating complex pages is to make them both interesting to your visitors and informative to the search engines. If you just plunk links down on a page you’re allowing everyone else to figure out what they mean and you’re wasting an opportunity to express your own ideas.