Hello writers What length of article are you writing these days for your sites or customers? For the basic blogpost type article some are writing 250, some 300, some only half of that, l'd be interested to hear your views. Cheers
I have always heard that Google will mainly recognize articles over 500 words. This could just be a rule of thumb, though if I were you I would always opt for 500 words just to make sure that your time has not been wasted.
I've never heard of that so not sure of your source. You have to think in the real world would someone bother to write 500 words (every time) if they wanted provide a genuine editorial style review. I think not. I often write shorter review articles which may only come to 150 words or so but they are genuine reviews. A lot of the time I see these long articles that are basicallly trash and no-one would ever bother reading them. Therefore they add no value to the web and its users. A real life review of, for example, a restaurant even at only 150 words genuinely contributes something and therefore IMO holds a lot of value. I think the difficult job the search engines face is finding the difference between a genuine and "created for links" style article. That said, Google loves (original) content, so I'm sure a well worded and lengthy piece would probably carry more weight than the aforementioned mini review.
Google loves big articles, plus you get lots of long tail key words. The draw back of large articles is they thend to get a high bounce rate because they come up in searches for terms but the terms are way down the page and people are to lazy to read that far and don't know how to use the "find" tool so then google will send you back in the serps for having high bounce. One good trick for large articles is to title sections so people can skim down the title and find what they are looking for easier also you can use the title tags (h1 h2 h3) on keywords. Most people seldom read all of large articles on the internet unless they are devoted to studying a subject in depth. Most internet browsers are looking for fast food they want some info right there and fast if they don't see it they click next.
I have also heard that if you have 500 words post I am not sure whether it is right or not because I have seen 300-400 word content also won place of 1st of google search.
The hardest thing to manage is Keyword Density and Word Count. Typically you want your article to be around 450-500 words with a KD of 2-3% (no not Kill/Death Ration for all my COD Black Op Buddies) Anything lower than that you run the chance of decreasing your rankings, especially if you're using long tailed keywords. A good way to market long articles, 700-1000 words or more is to just create Part 1, Part 2 and so on. This would also give you another natural listing with the same keyword increasing your visibility.
For the basic blogpost type article some are writing 250, some 300, some only half of that, l’d be interested to hear your views.
I think 250-300 blogpost type articles should be posted on blogs only. What you really want is a 400-500 word articles that link to the 200-300 word blog post. I think articles can be too short that the message isn't conveyed. If you really feel you can give the reader what you promised in your title then it doesn't really matter how long it is... I would still keep it at least 300 words.
I typically keep articles between 300 to 500 words. So long as the content is interesting, engaging, and well written, as well as keyword rich, you will be just fine.
For the good SEO optimization the article must contain 400+ words. The important thing is how your building your site content and matching your links with your old posts. This will helps you to get better ranking in SERPs.
I usually makes the articles between 550-1000 words for 2 reasons. 1. The search engine has something to go on, instead of just a 200 word text. 2. Not many readers want to read over 1000 words.
300-500 seems to give you the good balance of sufficient search engine love and readability. But I have to agree with those who say the key to organic traffic is the long tail keywords, the more words the more long tail possibilities, thus: "content is king"
More than the total word count, your focus should be on optimizing the right keywords and their quantity. Overdo it and your article will be rejected or considered as spam... Ideally, a keyword per 100 words is best.... Irrelevant of how lengthy the article is... Of course, you don't want it to be drabby....