Thread: What is Optimal Word Count for Articles and Content?

Originally Posted by Relwan

I think articles having more than 500 words is always good. Articles word depends upon quality, More word means more information.

The longer articles are better for the reader but for SEO the shorter articles may be better. With the short copy you can target a keyword per article and align the tags (description, title, alt, h tags).

There's also a question on return on investment. The is a lot easier getting a roi on 400-500 word articles than one thousand word articles. Not to say that you shouldn't mix it up a bit and have some longer articles.

The answer isn't black and white. The short copy may be better for SEO and ROI for publishers. But the long copy is more favorable in selling products in selling products and services.

I usually like to write articles in the 500 - 700 range. 300 words is not enough to clearly talk about a topic.

Originally Posted by 5starpix

I usually like to write articles in the 500 - 700 range. 300 words is not enough to clearly talk about a topic.

300 is a little low. I just rewrote an article for an enzine submission to increase the wordcount to 500. Even 500 seemed a little low to make the topic clear.

All the articles I write are usually 600-700 words long

Originally Posted by ivan

All the articles I write are usually 600-700 words long

I tend to write articles that average 300 to 500 words. But the final copy picks up a 100 or so more words. I think that 500 words for article distrubtion is a good wordcount. The 600-700 word copy works better as content for your own website.

I think 500 words is long enough. But it won't hurt if you use 1000 or 1500 words. It can only benefit you, especially if you have a lot information to share...

Originally Posted by Sukijus

I think 500 words is long enough. But it won't hurt if you use 1000 or 1500 words. It can only benefit you, especially if you have a lot information to share...

The issue with longer copy is whether you will be able to get a return on investments as oppossed to splitting 1500 words into 3 or 4 seperate targeted articles.

I think it depends on what you are capable of writing and comfortable with.

Originally Posted by Benleem

I think it depends on what you are capable of writing and comfortable with.

With the site owner writing the copy, longer articles with most likely work the best. It's fairly difficult to provide enough useful information in a 300 word article to make it useful as a resource.

I believe that for publishing 350 words are a good target. The issue is to get a return on the investment which will be harder for longer copy.

My opinion, and this is the standard that I have set for myself, 400 - 600 words is good. A lot of my articles include images and sometimes a video.

Writing the article, finding the images on my computer, resizing the images, watermarking the images, embedding the video, spell check, proof reading,,,,, when an article gets in the 1,000 word range, I'am usually looking at at least 1 - 2 hours to write that article.

Its easier to break that 1,000 word article into 2 - 500 word articles, give them different titles, different tags, interlink them, and leave a slightly larger footprint in the search engines.