On Webmaster World there is a pretty good thread showing a step by step guide on how to implement pagination for long articles (over 500-700 words) for SEO purposes.

Among the reasons you would want to do that:

• Increase the volume of unique content
• Increase the pageviews (if you are using a CPM advertising solution this would almost double your income)
• Decrease the bouncerate on your website (call me paranoid but I bet the Google uses that as a quality factor in organic ranking).

Among the biggest issues with this, is how you handle comments. Basically you have to choose from 4 options:

• Have the same comments on all the newly created pages (for wordpress i think this is the only available solution)
• Have each part have its own comments (there is no plugin as far as i know for wordpress but in this case you can simply create a new post for each part and link them after you are done)
• Have the comments separated from the content (similar to a forum, where the article title is the name of the thread)

Here are the main steps from the WW forum:

1. Page 1 naturally enough uses the overall title of the article for both its title tag and header, and has a unique meta-description.
2. Every internal page then has its own unique title and header tag h1. These are based on the first SUB-head for that section of the article. This means more keyword research and writing of subheads than would normally be the case. If the article is considered as a whole, then an h2 tag would seem more accurate semantically. But Google looks at the semantic structure one URL at a time, not for the overall multi-URL article. Most pages also include internal subheads, and these are style as h2
3. On each internal page, there is also a “pre-head” that does use the article title from page 1 in a small font. This pre-head does not use a header tag of any kind, just a CSS style. This pre-head article title is at the top as a navigation cue for the user.
4. An additional navigation cue is that the unique page titles each begin with the numeral “2.” or “3.”
5. Each internal page also has a unique meta description, one that summarizes that page specifically, rather than summarizing the overall article.
6. Every page of the article links to every other page at the top and the bottom. None of this anemic “Back | Next” junk. There’s a complete page choice shown on everywhere – 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6| 7 – and there is also a centered link at the end of each page: Next: Linked title of the next page goes here
7. The linked numbers that are used as on-page navigation also include a title attribute that matches the title tag of the target page. I’m still not sure what a title attribute does for Google exactly, if anything, but the tool tip that it generates is a major aid for the reader of a long article.
8. Those navigation numbers are very clearly coded to show which page is active. And the nav number for the active page is NOT linked. We don’t want the user to click and end up right where they started, and we don’t want to “waste” a link that has no real function.
9. rel=”next” and rel=”prev” link tags are also included in the section h2

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