I couldn’t agree more. I find it is important to break up content and create pages for each meaningful “concept.” If you have a website that talks about the effects of different pharmaceuticals, you wouldn’t want one giant FAQ-style page for each drug you were discussing. As you rightfully state, it dilutes the ability to rank for any one single “concept” on that page.

However, I do believe that there are limits to the effectiveness of this segmentation. For example, if you have a real estate website, you’d want to rank for concepts like the following:

“House for sale”
“House for sale in Ohio”
“House for sale in Springfield, OH”
“Two-Bedroom House for Sale in Springfield, OH”

Each “concept” here would potentially have it’s own page. The key is to know when to quit.

It’s likely that long tail searches could include queries like “Two-Bedroom House for sale in Springfield, OH with Central Air.” Would you create this URL: “www.example.com/OH/springfield/two-bedroom/Central-air”? Where would it end?

The idea is to create a strong-enough “Two-bedroom house in Springfield, OH” page so that it would rank for all the other possible amenities. See where I’m going here? If you create too many pages that could all conceivable compete for the concept of “two-bedroom house in “Springfield, OH,” you risk diluting the possibility of any of them ranking… or you lose control of the page you WANT to rank by putting out too many URLs.

You don’t want to have one page competing for multiple concepts. On the flip-side, you don’t want too many pages competing for one concept.

Enjoyed the post!
-ken shafer
http://twitter.com/knit_hat