Does Size Matter In Seo?, How satisfied are you with your online website(s)? Options

[bwelford]

Anita Campbell has just published a funny blog item this morning, Top 10 Signs That Your Online Marketing Has Hit the Wall. It is a fitting introduction to a question I have been thinking about recently.

The Internet is becoming a very crowded place. That makes being visible in search engines even more of a challenge. One thing that helps is just having a large number of web pages that interlink, even if they are on different domains. That is one reason a blog is such an effective online property. There is lots of advice on SEO but I wondered how well people feel they are doing. The anonymous survey attempts to get some figures on that. Anonymous is important since the larger the sample the more interesting the results will be. So after reading this, please go back and vote. If you're not yet registered, then please do so since every vote counts.

In the survey Big means having more than 1,000 web pages, which could be in different online properties. For example if you have an online store that has 1,000 items for sale, then that puts you in the big category Small means having less than 1,000 pages.

Success means that you are satisfied with how things are going in terms of traffic and achieving your online goals. Ho-hum means that you would like results to be better but it is not a disaster. Dissatisfied means that you are unhappy with results and feel that getting an improvement is an urgent matter.

My guess is that those who signal success will be very much in the minority. I also suspect that the bigger sites will show more satisfaction in general. What do you think?

[bwelford]

Perhaps I may be excused for bumping this to keep it visible.

As I write some 88 people seem to have looked at this but only 9 have voted. Perhaps I can encourage everyone who reads this to go back and vote.

Clearly polls like this can not really give answers and can only suggest questions. In this case, although it is all anonymous, the questions themselves may produce skewed results. Of course it is a pleasure to vote that you are a Big - Success. Who wants to own up to being Small - Dissatisfied? Nevertheless the more who take the time to register their vote, the more we may be able to read something into the results.

What do you think of this survey?

[iamlost]

I voted already.
Stop nagging, you fora-marketer - where's the do not nag list ...

There are problems with internet polling as I 'm sure you are aware. Those statistical quibbles aside:
* your scale is wrong - 1000 pages is still on the small size, certainly not 'large'.
* both size and market differ greatly between blog and non-blog site, information and ecommerce, etc.

[bwelford]

Sorry iamlost. Clearly your nagging sensitivity meter is on a hair trigger setting.

Re the scale, I would guess that of the order of 99.9 percent of all websites or clusters of related websites have less than 1,000 pages.

On the second item, if only this was as easy as political polling. However if so far only nine responses are given to choices as simple as this, making a poll that involved say 27 possibilities would have scared everyone off.

[joedolson]

* your scale is wrong - 1000 pages is still on the small size, certainly not 'large'.

I don't agree: it's not that it's wrong, it's just simplified. Where 1000 pages may not be large, 999 pages isn't _exactly_ small, either. There's a huge difference between a 10 page brochure site and a 850 page products and information site -- neither may be large, but "small" is simply a matter of perspective.

While it's true that Barry could have divided this up further - 1 - 10 pages, 11 - 50, 51-250, 251-1000 and so on, it would have made for an extremely intimidating list of options -- for a survey of this kind of sophistication, probably far more than it's worth.

I think what should be drawn from this is that "for the purpose of this survey, please consider a large site to be 1000 pages or greater." The mistake may have been in using any kind of "large" or "small" label, since these are loaded terms according to the reader's perspective.

Regardless, with only 10 responses, you can't get a lot of information.

[bwelford]

... and what about the 99 others as I write (total views at this point 109), who did not express an opinion. In political surveys, they often split the don't knows among the decideds to figure out how the whole thing breaks down. I wonder how those 99 split among the Success / HoHum / Dissatisfied camps.

[Ron Carnell]

Dissatisfied means that you are unhappy with results and feel that getting an improvement is an urgent matter.

I didn't take the poll because (1) I qualify across the board on the first criteria (teeny, small, big, mega-big) and (2) I can't imagine being anything except dissatisfied, by your definition, with any of my sites. The day I stop wanting to improve even my best site is the day I'll shut the virtual door. They all suck.

[iamlost]

iamlost opened mouth and changed feet, again.

Barry:
1. I attempted a knock-off telemarker joke. It flopped. Apologies.

2. Regarding size: just because the majority of sites may be under 1000 pages, or under a hundred for that matter, is immaterial. Size is a scale measurement, i.e. small, medium, large, not of percentages. I simply do not consider lumping 1,000 pages in with 100,000 pages (or 100,000 with 10,000,000) as size equity.

You asked a question and I replied. Not to make a fuss, as Joe said you simplified things, rather to suggest you had simplified too far. Especially given the ease to scale dynamic ecommerce sites.

Ron:

Success means that you are satisfied with how things are going in terms of traffic and achieving your online goals.

I read it as satisfied with achieving goals, I generally am. Of course once a goal is being approached it is time to move the goalposts. I think it not incongruous to be currently satisfied whilst looking to improve.

I qualify across the board on the first criteria (teeny, small, big, mega-big)

So answer twice. Once for generally small and once for generally large. Give the man some numbers.

Of course asking such questions of Cre8 regulars who only practice best practices and operate high value sites skews things to fat and happy ...oops, not available options...

They all suck.

Isn't that a C&W song?

[A.N.Onym]

The second part is confusing to me, too.

I have a small site, and for the efforts I put in developing it, it works great. But on the overall scale, it doesn't bring 100ks of visitors and doesn't rake in $ks, too. And no, I haven't achieved my goals yet.

So I am both satisfied with my own efforts and their results and dissatisfied that I have put too little of them in the site and havne't seen the end results I wanted

10% of online visitors participate on the websites. This poll isn't an exception.

Also, judging by your description, it is very easy to get into the small/dissatisfied division, which no one wants to publicly admit to belong. The poll title is about competition, too.

This post has been edited by A.N.Onym: Sep 26 2008, 12:58 AM

[bwelford]

Also, judging by your description, it is very easy to get into the small/dissatisfied division, which no one wants to publicly admit to belong. The poll title is about competition, too.

You're right, Yura, that folk often don't reply to surveys. But it's anonymous, so no one will know whether you've voted or how you voted. Why not slip your vote in while no one is looking.

[EGOL]

I didn't vote because I have too many sites and probably fewer sites than most people who visit here.

I think that the measure of success is not really in how big the site is but instead with who is running the site. I have a 5000 page site that is doing great and a five page site that is doing great.

I also had big sites and small sites that I abandoned because they didn't perform well. I was not the right person to run them.

So I stopped working on them to spend more hours on sites that are a better fit for me.

[A.N.Onym]

Barry, where in the poll does it say it's anonymous?

Also, I'd break the paragraph at "The anonymous survey" in your post.

This post has been edited by A.N.Onym: Sep 26 2008, 09:15 PM

[bwelford]

Hi Yura
All polls done here are anonymous, in the sense that there is no way of identifying who voted on which choice. I as a moderator have no access to any data that would allow me to make that identification. Presumably the admin could, if they wished, check some data or other but it's hard enough to stay ahead of the spammers without trying to micro-analyze poll results. All secrets are safe with us.