23 replies to this topic

[jonbey]

OK, for some reason, I guess I read it somewhere, I though for SEO a good length for an article was about 600 words.

Also, a pal (successful aff chap) told me that the ideal length to increase conversions is 250 words (based on someone else's research).

I had been keeping new articles short.

But (big butt)

Just looked at my most popular articles in the SE's and they are all in the range 800-1500 words.

Got me thinking:

1. maybe many recent articles need beefing up
2. is there an ideal length?
3. why did I drink so much Rioca on a Tuesday night?

[Ruud]

is there an ideal length?

Yes. 287 words, Verdana, 14px (max!!), in black (you can get away with grey but I wouldn't risk it).

Every second paragraph has to be exactly 42 words unless your first sentence would be 18 words in which case every second paragraph has to be 37 words but that goes without saying, I know.

This post length thing is a bit of a nonsense. Yes, there is a bit of a minimum. Yes, if content gets too long you **may** run the risk of diluting certain queries for it.

As for the beefing up, I'm somewhat of a vegetarian so I guess it would be vegging it up for me?

[AbleReach]

Mix it up.
It will vary according to what you do, what the SERPS are doing, what the audience wants and your own goals.
What kinds of conversions are you looking for? Adsense? RSS subscriptions? Inlinks? Web design clients? Each of these will have different needs.

The SEO question is never enough on its own.

Write for your readers.

Shorter updates are good for taking advantage of the new content boost that can happen with new content.
Short pages are more targeted by nature - fewer words, fewer terms, harder to get a good spread of terms for adsense, but also good bait (if you're consistently the breaking news resource guy) for RSS subscribers.

Longer, more resource-like posts are more likely to pull in long tail search terms, lots of them. Even if those terms aren't covered on the page, seeing them in your server logs will give you ideas for more stuff. You might also use them to get inlinks from others who need a resource to link to. If you're selling ads based on page views, you'll want to break up longer posts into page 1, page 2, page 3, etc.

The short page could cover a specific item from a catalog. The long page could have a chart that compares different items, and describes factors to address when making a purchase choice.

If you're talking blogging and are establishing yourself as a WP resource, the short page could be like a service announcement, stating that a new version of WP has just come out, posted the moment you notice the update is going to be available. Include links to any of your previously written helpfulness -- troubleshooting & how-tos about upgrading, possibly ending with a short statement that you are available for hire.

The long-ish page could come next - perhaps a list of plugins that aren't getting along with the new version, yet, and possible workarounds. If you have enough stuff in there to be a trusted resource for breaking news, you will get links from other bloggers. Pinging plugin authors is a great way to get them to come out and interact, which is a networking opportunity.

////////////

Purely from a casual browse -- has anyone else noticed that Bing users tend to land on the longer pages?

Edited by AbleReach, 28 October 2009 - 08:12 PM.

[copywriter]

Agreed. There is no "optimal" length for the search engines. Write for your readers and include keyphrases. Give quality, non-promotional information that is helpful and useful to the reader then use the bio/About the Author section as your blatant advertisement.

[A.N.Onym]

It depends on how you do it and which pages we are talking about.

Can sales pages be short and long? Yes, depending on how you've written them.

Affiliates might work well with short pages to have people click-through to other sites: but is it your goal or you'd like to keep people on your site?

As with Elizabeth, I've noticed that longer pages get much more long tail traffic. With a sufficient amount of anchor text and links, it's possible to rank them for any phrases, so I wouldn't worry about dilution unless you really drown the keyphrases with your own hands (i.e., use them very, very sparingly yourself).

[jonbey]

I am surprised that there is not at least an optimum range for SEO. I am certainly seeing that on my main site. The bigger articles are getting a lot more traffic.

But, maybe I need to compare 3 shorter ones against one biggun.

[Ruud]

There isn't a real optimum because there's no such measure in Information Retrieval. That the keyword should be somewhere; yes. That when the title contains the keyword the document tends to be more relevant towards that keyword; yes. But length of article ... what would that say about whether or not a document is relevant to a query?

IF such a measure would exist it would be a local one (for your document only), like keyword density. IF there would be such a measure that would be weighted index wide we would have to speculate there are several such weights: the "optimum" content length for an article about parallel universes can hardly be expected to be the same as the optimum length for an article about spam.

Longer articles tend to get more traffic, often better ranking. Longer content = more changes to match it against a query. Longer content = usually more links.

[sonjay]

Remember back in high school, your teachers would assign term papers, essays & other writing assignments by number of words or pages? You had to turn in 500 words or 10 pages or whatever on the assigned topic?

In college, I majored in journalism, and my Journalism 101 prof confounded the entire class by refusing to give us any length requirement. The only guidance he gave us was, "Write enough to cover the subject adequately, and then stop." All the students were scratching our heads and puzzling over that. It took us a couple of assignments to get our minds around that concept, coming from the "10 pages" background as we did.

I find that guideline to be useful in writing for the web. Write enough to cover the topic, and then stop. I haven't counted words since high school.

[bwelford]

All of the above give useful points to consider.

Broadening the topic a little, I do not think you should consider only individual posts but the total output you will put into the blog. A key consideration there is the amount of time you wish to devote to the blog.

If you are blogging more than 3 times per week then you can basically make any blog post the length you want.

If you occasionally may drop to a post per week or less often then I believe that plays into the blog post length question. Even a short post of 200 words or less may be useful in creating an entry in the RSS news feed and providing a platform for all the internal links that blogs create. So try to do a 200 word post as a minimum every week. If you have a little more time, then expanding it into the 400 - 800 word range may give you more ability to do some significant SEO effort on it.

Of course if the spirit takes you, you can rant on for longer than that but diminishing returns quickly sets in from a SEO point of view. With longer posts, you can use synonyms and related concepts more that may open up some other interesting long tail traffic. I'm presently finding Google Insights is a useful mind-opening application here.

[pmolds]

i think you should follow se

[caneman]

I think article length really depends on what you are trying to do. If you are doing affiliate marketing using article marketing then 250-350 with a pre-sell teaser is what I have found is very good. If you are building content for your website then you need over 500 words. This has been my experience, ymmv.

[cre8pc]

That's a good point Caneman. I hear different suggestions on the amount of words but not qualifiers for different situations. And then, there is what to put into that content to be considered, in each of the different situations

:wave: Welcome to Cre8!

[jonbey]

Actually I heard an aff expert say before that 250 word reviews converted best.

Just realised that my most popular page is not over 27,000 words, due to all the comments. So maybe no upper word limit after all!

[netshmoozer]

Writers tend to write spontaneously on their first draft. It gives you freedom and you can detail whatever you want to say out in the open. The second draft would be for finding errors. Find mistakes and create a solid article that no grammar checker and editor can put a finger on. The final draft is what you want other people to view in your pages. You may have removed parts of your first draft or added a few points. After going through these stages, what comes out may just be your optimal, average number of words.

[jonbey]

Yeah, but I was asking if there was any stats on the optimum length of a page for best SE results. If you want to rank in 1st place, maybe too little or too many words could hold you back? But, I do not think this is the case now, from personal experience. If you are writing sales copy then limiting words seems to improving conversions, at least in some niches.

[EGOL]

I have pages on my site with a two sentence paragraph and pages with 4000+ word articles with ten to twelve large captioned images. The pages that rank for the most competitive terms are the long articles (1000 to 4000 words with several nice images). I believe that they have attained that because they are the most linkworthy and have attracted enough links to take top position.

I had about 80 pages with two sentences and one large image. I upgraded them to 500 to 1000 word articles with four to eight nice images. Rankings went up across the board.

In addition the traffic shot up for all of those articles. Because the 500 to 1000 words on the page put them in competition for a lot more long tail queries. Over 1/2 of the traffic comes from long tail queries that were not possible with the two sentences.

[jonbey]

Hi Kik, remember I am not asking about what the reader wants in this case, but what the search engine prefers.

[EGOL]

If you have long articles and divide them up into subsections that the visitor can scan, reading only the subsections of interest then that I believe is a good compromise.

Most of my long articles hold visitors for a much longer amount of time than my short articles - so at least some of the visitors are reading them.

[3 Olives]

If your website does not rank for a term, and you want it to. My opinion 750 words is a solid mark to shoot for.

User conversion is a separate discussion, for simple ranking alone 750 unique words on a topic seems to work well for me.