How Many Words in Content for Good SEO?

[applesofgold]

I have heard it's best to have 400+ words of content for strong SEO per page. I believe this is true for the most.

I have a project in mind, however, that I am considering doing 100-200 words of content per page. This is for a glossary of terms for my industry, where I have a unique page for each term that describes what that term means w/ 1 image and a few links to related products.

Is having just 100-200 words going to be enough? Each page will still be unique, original content.

Or is it best to really try for longer articles?

In other words, is there a general rule for # of words per page for search engines to see the page as valuable and unique and to give it good ranking?

• Give me a BIG THUMBS UP if you found this question useful. It won't cost you anything! Thanks!

[EGOL]

This site gets a lot of image search traffic.  I can not tell you if the captions assist with that traffic.  But I do know that kickass images on a same-topic page will get traffic.

[Mcarle]

I have a hunch that part of the Google Algo is how long people spend on a page, and lots of big pretty pictures along with text entices people to look at said pretty pictures thus stay on each page longer while reading.

[Boodreaux]

Very informative on the added content getting long tail traffic.  How did the images help though?  Was it just the "content captions"?

Utah Tiger

[applesofgold]

Thanks, EGOL. That confirms what I'm thinking.

You mentioned image captions. I don't normally use them - do they help? I'm assuming this is for blog posts if its captions?

[EGOL]

Just saying what happened here...

I had about 80 pages about topics that are similar to glossary entries.

I tossed them up with an image and two sentences.  That was 3 or 4 years ago.  Some of them ranked on the second or third page of google and they pulled a little traffic.  Not much traffic a few visitors per day for most of the pages.

Then, after a year or two I started upgrading them to a couple paragraphs and one or two nicer, larger images with captions.  Within a couple of months rankings went up (I don't build links on this site). Some of them were on the first page of google but most not.  Traffic shot up like a rocket.  Not that much from a ranking increase but because now there were lots more words on those pages and they interacted with queries to bring lots of long tail visitors.  The result was each of these pages started pulling a few dozen visitors each day.

Now, I am slowly upgrading these pages to articles of 500 to 3000 words and three to twelve images with generous captions, some with data tables some with a video.  Rankings on the ones that I have improved moved up significantly and are now in the top 5 of google.  Traffic on the pages that I have improved now hits a few hundred visitors per day per page.  I am working on another one today.

Bottom line... When compared to trivial content, substantive content pulls in lots more long tail traffic and will sometimes rank a little better on the basis of the richer content alone.  An investment in richer content will immediately increase your traffic.