Aside from determining the topic of their articles, writers are constantly bombarded with another struggle-trying to figure out just how long to make their content.
Yes, if you attract readers with a great topic they will likely spend the time it takes to read it. However, if you constantly ramble on about a topic, you will also lose your readers. So how do you know just how long to make it?
Keep it simple.
When it doubt, it’s always best to keep your online content limited to between 300 and 500 words. This would generally be around one full page of content in a word processor, and it’s the preferred length of an article for online readers. Why? Because it’s easy to get through. It allows the author to provide a valid case for their writing without rambling, and it allows the reader to get through the entire article without having to take breaks.
If you’re writing online articles with the hopes of increasing your search engine optimization, you’ll want to try and generate articles that are around 500 words in length. This allows you to add in the relevant amount of keywords in a natural way. If you write an article with less than 500 words, you’re not going to optimize the content correctly with the right keywords.
When it comes to search engine optimization, keyword density is also important. For example, you want to have a solid ratio between the amount of content on your web page versus the size of the page. If you have 10 words on 2gb web page, you’re not implementing the right amount of keyword density. However, if you have 500 words on a 2gb web page, you’ll have a better chance of attracting the search engine spiders and increasing your search engine optimization.
Too short or too long can hurt your SEO.
In general, search engine spiders will not waste their time trying to crawl and index a web page that contains less than 250 words. If you have pages on your site that only contain a handful of words, it’s likely these pages aren’t getting indexed, which could hurt your overall SEO efforts.
But too much copy can also hinder your success. Web pages that contain more than 650 words can also find themselves being ignored by the search engines. If you find that you’re writing more than 650-word articles, you may want to try and determine if you can break the article into two (or three) separate articles. Not only will the search engines be more willing to search and index this content, but it will also make your readers more willing to actually read it. If they read and enjoy what you said, they may share it with their friends and followers. This increases your readership by generating more traffic to your site, and more traffic can help to increase your SEO. (Oh, and for the record, this article comes in at 513 words.)