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

I'm wondering what the best word count SEO-wise is for articles and webpage copy? Are articles having 1000 words too long?

I try to have 400-500 words per article, but I don't see why 1000 would be too long; I have articles with 7000 words.

I generally aim at around 500 words. It's a round number, and tends to work pretty well. I wonder how little you could get away with, though.

400-500 words is a good article wordcount..

1000+ words content goes excellent if you're giving some valuable and authentic info. It gets you a decent PR as well as ranking in search engines. Many great how-to and info-rich pages rank really well with this wordcount.

I'd prefer reading a 1500-words article over reading a 300-words article that sucks ass. I'd also prefer reading a 300-words article that's written well over a bad written 1500-words article.

As long as the article stays good I don't see why there should be a perfect amount of words for a good text. On average most good articles can tell a lot of information in about 500-600 words so maybe you should aim for that amount of words

- Aquarezz

Originally Posted by Shenron

I try to have 400-500 words per article, but I don't see why 1000 would be too long; I have articles with 7000 words.

Could there be an issue that there isn't enough PR to have all the content indexed when all the articles are long?

Originally Posted by Charles

I generally aim at around 500 words. It's a round number, and tends to work pretty well. I wonder how little you could get away with, though.

I prefer the articles 400-500 words. The 250-300 word artilces seem to work well as blog posts.

Originally Posted by ChillingBreeze

400-500 words is a good article wordcount..
1000+ words content goes excellent if you're giving some valuable and authentic info. It gets you a decent PR as well as ranking in search engines. Many great how-to and info-rich pages rank really well with this wordcount.

The 1000+ word articles should keep readers on the site longer. I guess it would take a few minutes to read a 1000 word article. This is a benefit when you are branding a site. I have a few 1000+ articles for a project I'm working on. I was thinking of splitting them. But now I'm thinking that the long content will be a good fit for the site.

Apart from SEO, there's also cost issues with the long artilces. I just split apart a 1000 word article and turned it into a min-site. IS there a ROI for long content?

Originally Posted by Aquarezz

I'd prefer reading a 1500-words article over reading a 300-words article that sucks ass. I'd also prefer reading a 300-words article that's written well over a bad written 1500-words article.

As long as the article stays good I don't see why there should be a perfect amount of words for a good text. On average most good articles can tell a lot of information in about 500-600 words so maybe you should aim for that amount of words

- Aquarezz

I have about 25 articles completed so far. I like the 600-650 word articles the best.

But short ones that have words omitted and pack a good punch of information work well too. That is for the reader. But they may be a little short to hit the long tails.

Hi,

I might be wrong but I don't feel that the word count makes a difference for PR or Seo. I can show you a site that is pr7 with a alexa rank of 486 thats average post might not be no more then 100 - 250 words per post.

Been around for awhile and has a lot of backlinks. I don't know that word count is the important part for SEO.

The really odd part it comes in as #1 at google for a keyword that appears only 2 times on the index page.

Butterflies Forever

Sami

Originally Posted by Sami4u

I might be wrong but I don't feel that the word count makes a difference for PR or Seo.

I believe that you are correct. The word count doesn't matter for SEO. The most important is to keep the language natural and use as many words as you need to get the message across.

Originally Posted by Sami4u

The really odd part it comes in as #1 at google for a keyword that appears only 2 times on the index page.

Butterflies Forever

Sami

Does the site have a lot of backlinks with the keyword in the anchor text?

400 to 500 words for an average article.

Otherwise, I would say tailor the article to your audience. If you're authoring a technical article on the Superstring Theory you'll most likely want a very long article. Anyone reading it wouldn't have a problem with something long and intricate. If you're trying to target a younger audience, be short and to the point. Writing an instructional article? You'll want a brief summary with clear steps, but you'll also want to go into detail as much as possible so no one gets confused. See what I'm saying?

Now, for SEO - I don't think an article can ever really be too long, as long as you're maintaining relevancy!

I find using 300-700 word articles work well for blog posts, although occasionally I like to write much longer articles (1500+ words) because lengthy articles which are really informative can get a lot of links.