I know there's not a precise figure and lots of variables that influence things, but what would you say is the ideal length of articles for pages created exclusively for SEO? 300 words? 500 words? 700 words? Is there a length below which Google doesn't give as much weight to a page? Thanks.
A friend said to me ideal is you have 300 or 400 words (I don't remember) and have 12 keywords. Of course you need to use bold in some of them. This friend read in a black hat forum. But I don't believe it is right. It depends a lot and we know people like lenght text. And Google Bot try to be like humans. Are you trying to optimize some specific word?
I'd agree with 500 words being a decent outline (though like you said, it's based on many different factors). Avoid Google's spam filters by keeping your keyword density to below 6% (ideally around 3-4%).
Whatever amount you need to convey the message to your readers. Remember, you're not writing for the search engines; you're writing for people. Just keep it natural and organic.
I don't think there is an ideal amount of text involved. Just stick to what works, title tags, keyword within the first few sentences and just write for people. Bolding and all that other spammy stuff worked in 2004-2005 , I doubt that has much weight anymore.
Hi, The amount of words in article are 450 to 700 that would be the best choice as all know. But in that much of content page try to make the keywords Highlighted and For the Article is Related. Use keyword with the proper sentence otherwise it would be caught as spam. Regards, Chaitanya Patel. Senior SEO. cygnet-infotech.com
a friend told me that it doesn't matter how many is your text, as long as you limit the title in 60 characters unique every page and the meta keywords is up to 250 characters only and of course you have to maintain your keyword density into 4% only
Also keep in mind that you want to try and keep your code to text ratio as low as possible. The less code you have the more your text actually stands out to the spiders and is easier for them to crawl. A 50/50 split between code and text would be ideal but is difficult to achieve. I tell most of my clients to shoot for 60 percent code, to 40 percent text.
Yikes, I'm glad Dan chimed in! If you're trying so hard to please the SE's that you're limiting or increasing the number of words on your page solely for that purpose then you should have a think about exactly what you're trying to achieve with your site. I know this is an SE forum but remember no search engine will bring you the amount of traffic that you will get by creating a site that PEOPLE will love... Andrew
Great advice there, thank you so much. You are the others are right, Andrew: articles should not be written exclusively for SEO. We have hired top notch writers for the content; just need input on the approximate length and how to make it more search engine friendly. On another note, is there any useful reading material out there on how to structure a large site and the links between the pages to optimise it for SEO? Also is it best to target one keyword phrase per page or can you target two or three?
Is there any SEO problem with having a 2,000 word (or longer) page? I can't think of one. Google spiders would eat it up. This depends on your strategy. If the single word is very popular, you should add a second word to it and target the combined key-phrase. For example, it would be futile to target "SEO," so you should add another word like "Las Vegas" to it (here, assuming you are a Las Vegas SEO company). If your word is not competitive, you can target it alone. For example, if your targeted keyword is "Joslingson," your article should dominate that term immediately because that term is so rare.
I have pages that rank with 1 sentence and pages with 750 words and everything in between. The more content on the page, the more chance that page has of ranking under multiple phrases...
for me i write article 350 to 400 words i think this amount of word is search engine friendly because i just wrote an article and the day after that my article rank in a search engine, not that high but enough to generate traffic coming from search engine
High ranking pages appear to need to strike a balance between the title, body, link anchors and alt tags. All 4 of those categories are used by google on my pages as I've seen all of them in results. It appears that google likes pages with more content because they attempt to determine "areas" of the page and sprinkle results from the different areas. In other words, I see a number of my bullet points being used in search results. It appears they like that because it creates variety. I use a program called WebPosition which does a pretty good job of analyzing a page. It tells me how to improve the results. Even with a program like WebPosition, it's still difficult to achieve a perfect SEO'd page though. The layout is important to achieve high rankings. My page, for example, would do better if I could move my "articles" info/link above my bullet points, however, it wouldn't look very good and the bullet points are more important to my customers when reading the page.
Azam, Glad to hear you've got some good content writers on board. The best way to look at it is again is from the user perspective. Remember search engines can take into account performance of your pages, one of the factors being how long an average user stays on your page... That's where the article length would come into play - what is a comfortable length of article for someone to read? If a user turns up and sees a 2000 word article, they MIGHT get discouraged and leave but of course it depends on how good the writing is and how relevant to their search query. Everyone is right in saying that (while there many factors involved) a good size article is around 400-600 words all other factors being equal. But the above factors considered, you should also be careful of things like spacing, bolding of important phrases, keeping the paragraphs short, all things that will make it easiest for real people to read. If you please the people you'll please the engines Hope that helps. Andrew