too much text?
 

let me first introduce myself to the board. HELLO, i'm still trying to learn as much as possible about link lists and SE optimization and i'm very happy that i found this board.

now for my question: is there such a thing as too much text? for example i have a template that i am using right now with on average 3-4 different gallery pages.

now on each one of the main gallery pages i have at least 200 sometimes 300 words talking about whats going on in each on of the movies(thumbnail pictures).

when a surfer clicks on a thumbnail they are taken to a .html page where there is at least 250 words on the movie page describing the movie.

like i stated earlier i have a lot of text, mainly for SE reasons. all of the pages are SE optimized very well but i just wanted to know how link list owners feel about this.

Hi kinimod |waves| welcome to the board :)

An example of what you are trying to explain would be most helpful.

text is king with search engines

sounds pretty spammy to me

DD

Text is good for the SE's and I would encourage anyone to use good copy on their sites - just stay away from repeating keywords in it over and over - and don't go over board - strike a balance between txt, images and graphics.


Cheers,

Paul

A bit harsh Dave - assuming you have not read the text! Webmaster was asking a legit question - No!

I'd have to agreee with DDave - without even looking at the page, 250 words seems like a large amount of text for a gallery:

*****
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*****

250 may sound a lot, but, if it is written up well, and the page layout breaks it up a bit - it shouldn't look to bad - and it will help the webmaster pull in some extra SE traffic - my pet hate is the opposite - absolutly no text, or very, very, little on the pages.

kinimod: Post some examples if you don't mind - lets have a look at your copy... as I said in the earlier post, it is about striking a balance - If you can say what needs to be said in 150 words, use 150 rather than 250.

Cheers,

Paul.

..and my answer was entirely legitimate...

Unless he is describing... the street of the man that bought the dye pigment of the thread that makes up the fabric of the covering of the matress under the sheets on the bed the too people are fucking on................

... how the fuck are you gonna get 250 words on a single page with a single movie!

Still sounds like SE spam to me.

DD

Dave - Without having seen the copy your answer was pure conjecture - nothing more, nothing less. If you could call it an answer - looked more like an accusation to me.

The webmaster may be reviewing/describing a one hour movie for all we know - then 250 words may be sufficient for what he is trying to achieve.

Cheers,

Paul.

While none of us have seen the site in question, its hard to make a true judgement.

My thoughts are if the text involved actually helps the surfer to decifer the content he is about to see/view then it is all good.

We have all heard the words so often "content is god" and if you have the ability to give good content in text... well, good for you!

Paul is right... without seeing the site... we cannot assume it is spam

That's quite a lot of text imo.

Can I make two constructive observations?

1) Every paragraph starts with the word "Alright".
2) 2nd, 3rd & 4th paragraphs are all in caps.

|lightsabe

I can nuke the "alright" from the text and would it be better in your opinion to make all the paragraphs all caps or just use normal text?

what does that mean? you killed a demon?

OK... that is cool you posted an example.

Apart from the part where I have a nasty eye disorder that I cant read captials... and you start ever para with "alright" your text actually isnt too bad. You are pushing your main keywords too hard (I would take off the bold) but all in all its a good description of the site.

Dave is right when he says text can be spammy, but if you use it well, and see the surfers as your friends and really tell them about something (content) then text is magic.

I think large blocks of caps are harder to read, you don't ever see books published in caps.

Also using mostly caps reduces the impact of when you do need to use caps for important links or text under banners.

.....

http://www.textpad.com/ has a free text/html editor and if you drag the mouse over the text you can hit Ctrl+L to reset that all in lower case or Ctrl+Shift+K for normal sentence case.

very good point Urb!

thank you for that link because i was sitting here thinking to myself "damn thats a lot of text to rewrite."

Hey Kinimod - thanks for posting the link!

I see what you are trying to do there with the text - I would suggest this. first off lose the caps - as Urb pointed out, any other text you want to highlight, weather it be by capping up key phrases are bolding them - the effect is watered down if everything is capped. Keep it lower case and use the caps and bolding in the copy to catch the surfers eye as he scans the page - bear in mind that when someone surfs in to see your pics/movies they are unlikely to stop and read the whole text - so the above is an ideal way to get your message across.

I don't think you have went overboard with the amount of text - but you have stretched the point a bit in your copy describing the content on the vids, and there is no need to repeat keywords over to many times. What you could have done is replaced some of those video descriptions with some more info about the site you are selling - tell the surfer what he is getting... pics vids movies... are they downloadable... how often does it update... etc etc....

Dave - I bumped into a mutal friend of ours last week in Blighty! http://www.mondoerotica.net/roger.html