What is Optimal Word Count for Articles and Content?

**Natural Elements** · 9 June, 2010, 22:14 PM

Originally Posted by bogart

A good place to look for keywords is the Google auto suggest and
Searches related to (at the bottom of the page)

At the least Google drives traffic to these keywords.

Google auto suggest can only give you the trend. I rarely use the Google keywords suggested because it is too broad, but you can be inspired which is different.

Besides that it is not unique if many webmasters use the same key phrases or keywords and you end up competing more than necessary.

**bogart** · 11 June, 2010, 06:12 AM

Originally Posted by Natural Elements

Google auto suggest can only give you the trend. I rarely use the Google keywords suggested because it is too broad, but you can be inspired which is different.

Besides that it is not unique if many webmasters use the same key phrases or keywords and you end up competing more than necessary.

Google Auto Suggest / Google Search Assist doesn't necessarily show keywords that have high competition. Most webmasters use the keyword tools like word tracker. Even some of the suggestions, I wouldn't think that the user would naturally use. But the auto suggest in the search box drives traffic on the keyword. Most likely then the keyword would be useless without the auto suggest traffic. There's even some (what I call deep) auto suggestions that you will only find as you type-in different letter combinations after the first keyword. Anyway there are some good keywords that you can find by playing around with it.

On the other hand I won't target the article to the keywords that I find in the auto suggest. Rather what I do is to first write the article. Then I go back and look for keywords that I can stick into the article title and drop a couple of times into the article. I'm usually ranking on the keywords and pick-up a little extra traffic that I wouldn't have otherwise.

**hendricius** · 21 July, 2010, 05:30 AM

I prefer 400-500 word articles, anything less than that would be too little to cover any topic and anything beyond that would be like a thesis which wouldnt be interesting any more.

**bogart** · 22 July, 2010, 01:10 AM

Originally Posted by hendricius

I prefer 400-500 word articles, anything less than that would be too little to cover any topic and anything beyond that would be like a thesis which wouldnt be interesting any more.

Articles between 300 to 400 words are working the best for me. You can increase the word count by mentioning the keywords a few times. Also, adding a 336x280 adsense block into the article helps stretch it out to a full page.