Best Length for an Article

I really think it depends on the intended purpose of the article. Blog posts should be at least 250 words. Articles for directory submission purposes should be anywhere from 400-600 words. You want an article to really focus on one topic. An article titled "How to Start a Home Business" wouldn't really be a good article because that's such a broad topic, you could never cover all the information adequately and you'd leave readers with unanswered questions.

Once you've narrowed your idea down to something specific (let's say "5 Home Office Supplies You Can't Live Without"), then you should format it so that it's easy to read. Headings, bulleted lists, numbered lists, etc. break up the text and make it easier to skim.

Now, if the purpose of your article is for SEO, there is some information coming out that Yahoo! is giving higher rankings to pages with >1,000 words per page. I would take extra care to break up an article of that length with headings, bold/italics formatting, bullets, numbered lists, and even some images to add visual interest. You've also got to consider your keyword density in crafting an article for SEO purposes - the keywords need to be used naturally, not stuffed into articles. The major search engines are always changing their algorithms and keyword spamming is no longer a viable option for generating top rankings.

 

They can be as long as you want as long as you can hold attention...

Be long but not long winded

Josiah

 

I would prefer 400 words + as it is the minimum requirement for posting in article diretcories.

 

That's totally it. A short article is good - if that's all the words you need to get your point across. A longer article is good for more in depth information. I feel the best sites have a mix - unless it's a news site or something.

 

keep the post short and informative. This can avoid the reader from leaving our website

 

Hello, articlewriter,

Your post was very useful to me - informative share. You mentioned that blog posts should be at least 250 words. How about their maximum length. I've been an active blogger (hoping to become a professional editor soon), so I am really interested in your expert opinion because I see you are experienced. I've read very diverse opinions about it and my personal opinion (on which I had an argument with a friend of mine these days) is that blog posts should be no longer than 600-700 words. Of course, exclusions are possible depending on the topic, article depth but generally speaking I think 600-700 words are the optimum.

 

Hi Flif:

I generally don't go over 500 words in a blog post because I think the goals of a blog and an article are different. I also think the length should depend on your audience. I know a blogger who sometimes goes on for 1,000 words or more, but I read every word of his posts because he has shown that he has some solid information and interesting opinions to share. He has a lot of traffic and comments, so others seem to think the same way I do.

As an avid blog reader, I myself prefer the posts to be shorter because I'm looking for information daily. One article might be enough to satisfy my curiosity on a subject, but if I am a regular reader of a blog, I want something short and to the point every day.

There's no hard and fast answer to this question - it depends on your audience, the purpose of your blog (AdSense income, building your reputation for a business, selling information products, etc.), and how much information you have to share.

 

500 words is what we go for

 

Agree, for both readability and SEO purposes 500 is the ideal length

 

"The first major difference that jumps out in the Yahoo results is the preference Yahoo's algorithm seems to have for more words on a page. The average number of words on a page for Google was 943 while Yahoo's average words per page in the top 10 was 1305." -- GoRank.com

Found this in my research and thought it would be useful for forum members.

 

That's the problem, many people want too many words written to get their sites ranked, but how good is this practice for getting returning visitors?

I have written no-sense long articles towards keyword density, as per customers' request. They really don't care how clueless they sound but getting visitors that click on their Adsense after being misled by search engines

 

For me the best length is whatever the employer asks for. The shortest was 50 words, the longest 6,000.

 

I've recently read some articles stating the same, so I'd go for 500 words as an optimum.

 

I voted before I looked at the results. Looks like I'm among the majority. As a reader and writer I prefer 250-500. You can get to the point within that range.

 

I second the same point of view too.With counted exceptions, articles beyond this lenght are Adsense intensive, meaning lots of keywords with increasing no-sense above 1,000

 

It depends on the topic.
As the chief editor of article-gems I get to read up to hundred articles a day. I think the ideal word length depends on your target audience and what your goals are. If your trying to educate them maybe you need well over a thousands words. If you just want them to click your link maybe 200 might be enough to convince them they want more.

The length of the article also depends on the topic. A personal experience may take a couple of sentences to relate or even require a series of articles.

Article Content is far more important than length. If you are a good writer people will read to the end of your article no matter its length.

This is one thing in which size is definitely not everything.

 

Honestly speaking I thing that the length counts but it shouldn't be of great importance to the reader or the writer. What matters the most is the content of the article itself. If this article is like a press release it should be aiming at as many people as possible. Thus you'll need to use bullets, grabbing sentences and you have to make your message clear so that many people comprehend it. It should be newsworthy material.

On the other hand if you're writing an article for the 9 legged spider that nobody's heard of , you'll have to write a detailed and explanatory article so that more people get to know the little creature. This will probably make the article longer. Judging by these types of writing one could say that the length varies and depends on the subject and many other things. So focus on the content and the length will come with it.

 

That's the other side of the topic - at least I see it just like that - when an accent is put on the content and not on the word count. Anyway, in my view, when content quality and word length optimum meet, the result turns out to be more than satisfactory.

 

I remember reading a recent report stating that longer articles are going to be valued more for SEO purposes under some Google changes (I don't follow them that closely, and can't remember where I saw that). At the same time, it's been proven repeatedly that readers on the Web simply won't read longer content the majority of the time. So we're seeing a split between articles for readers and articles for SEO.

For readers (which is how you should write as far as I'm concerned), shorter is better, so I'll generally stick to that, with the exceptions possibly being blog posts relying more on personal commentary where personality carries the content more than the content itself sometimes. I'm just going to keep writing for readers. It's what I've done from the start, and it's served me well, and frankly I refuse to stress and change my style b/c something might work better for SEO this week, but be changed by big G during the following one.

If you find yourself writing quality content that's proving to be long (like w/ the spider example above), the best way to handle it is to break the piece into multiple articles, and interlink them. That makes it easier on readers, and gets you more potential pageviews in the long run.

 

IMO it really depends on what your target audience is. Are you planning on website content or article site content? Typically I find that 450 words is great for places like ezine etc. As for the above post, I can guarantee that SE's are loving articles right now as I have seen the results firsthand. Longer website content is a bit tricker. I have found that a typical page encompassing everything that's necessary to convey the point really depends on the page topic. I could go on at length on this topic as it is something i run up against daily.

Christian
Creative Copywriting