How Much Content Comprises A “Proper” Web Page?

Content Length Misconceptions – Learn What Not to Do

Yesterday, I had a conversation with a prospective client pertaining to issues revolving around the lack of informative, quality content on each of the pages on their website. This is not the first time over the years, that I’ve had to address this matter with prospects. And in all cases, I kid you not, each person has strongly defended the lack of content, telling me that either: a) they read “somewhere”; or b) their web designer “instructed them”, that the correct length of the content on each web page should be entirely visible above the fold, and NEVER below the fold. So they did everything correctly and “web proper”. Sigh …

The term “above the fold” is used in web development to refer to the portions of a web page that can be visible on the monitor without scrolling.

Umm … so based on the conviction of “a” and “b”, that means when we land on a website, only the portion of your computer monitor’s screen should have the content. So why, pray tell, is there a right side vertical scrollbar visible on practically every web page we visit?

A scrollbar is a graphical object which allows the user to view continuous text, pictures or anything else that does not fit into the space in a computer’s monitor screen.

Because of this most recent conversation, I dug back into my memory bank, and thought I’d educate those of you who are new to having your own website by sharing an experience I had with a client of mine about a year ago.

I was hired as an SEO and online marketing consultant by a real newbie. Bless her heart … she had absolutely no idea about what it would take to get her service related business online. She shared how, because of her naiveness (which of course ANY newbie would have, I completely understand that), she got suckered in to paying someone $200.00 to design a website for her. Oh yes … what a “deal” she thought she was going to get!

Without going into the whole story, let’s just say she got exactly what she paid for! A very crappy poorly coded antiquated-design mess of a site, if you could even call it a “site”.

As a matter of fact, this $200.00 design job was supposedly done by someone who had told her they really understood HTML coding. HA! What a joke! Let’s just say anybody could have done a better job by going online and researching basic HTML coding structure.

After I explained to her everything that was wrong with her site, the content, the SEO, etc., she begged my helping in redesigning the site, which I did handle for her, but for a fee of course.

If I seem like I am going off track here with the topic at hand, that being “How Much Content Comprises A “Proper” Web Page”, well I am … sort of. But I’m telling you this first part about the website design fiasco because this same “expert” gave my new client some of the most ridiculous information about website content and how much you should write for each page that I’d heard in a long time.

My New Client’s Understanding of Proper Content “Length”

My client had provided carefully written content for the 5-pages she wanted on her website that would promote her business. Part of my job was to research the keyword phrases to target for her niche, and to properly SEO the tags. Along with that, I coached her how to tweak her content so that it incorporated the keywords into each web site page of content.

Her pages definitely needed to utilize the keywords I’d chosen for her, but I also mentioned she needed to flesh out the content a bit more, too. Reason being that I knew her website visitors would be more prone to stay on her site and hopefully place an order with her, if she wasn’t so sketchy with the on-page information. I told her they’d probably click right off her web page and go back to the search page to find another site to visit.

In regard to this conversation she emailed me saying:

“My understanding of a ‘page’ is what you can see when strolling [sic] down before the page ends, and I was told that it was better to have it all in that area only.”

Ummm … okay … say what?

So … she believed that a web page’s content ought only to be visible above the fold. Or another way to put it, to only be visible on a computer screen without needing to scroll down in order to continue reading the rest of the page.

Wrong! (Like I said before, bless her heart! She was trusting this other ill-informed person to steer her in the right direction.)

So, to straighten her out, here was my email reply to her:

About web page length … I believe I understand what you are trying to explain to me about “what you can see when scrolling down before the page ends”. This is referred to as “above the fold”. Whomever the person is that told you that is quite ill-informed. Please know that a web page is however many words of informative and well written content and/or images it takes to complete that page and to make sense to the person reading it, and to provide the information they were hoping to find when they landed on that web page!

Think about it … how many darn websites do you go to that you do indeed keep scrolling down to continue reading the content? It is very rare that we land on a website that has just a couple of short paragraphs on each web page!

So, if you are brand new, or even more than a little new to getting a website up and running, please know that each page of content you write should be everything and more for your visitors! If a short page is all that is necessary and does the trick, then fine. If it takes many many words and images to provide a great web page, then fine! Scrolling down a page to keep reading the content is NOT even an issue!

I believe wholeheartedly that it is much better to over-deliver in the information you provide on each page. I personally maintain this attitude for almost everything I write for my websites and blogs. I do not take into consideration it’s length. I focus on quality of content!

I suggest you adopt this same attitude, too. You can’t be wrong by doing so, and your web site content will be all the better because of it!

Not sure if your website could use a little tweaking or a major over-haul in order to better promote your products or services to a larger target group of customers? That is why I am happy to offer a free 30-minute SEO phone consultation to you. To learn more or set-up a call with me, please go to: Complimentary Consultation. I look forward to chatting. My goal is always to help my clients achieve all they desire via their website and online marketing efforts!