What do you think is the sweet spot for article length?
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If you were creating an informational website, how many words on a typical page do you think would be ideal for achieving the best organic traffic and rankings? Why?
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I agree with what has been said here, I do not think there is a "sweet spot" as far as number of words goes but the article needs to be long enough to give useful information.
That being said it is difficult to imagine to many articles that are less than 300 words that would be of interest and use to the reader.
My suggestion would be to find sites that you think give excellent useful information (maybe like seomoz) and see what the average length of their articles are, but always think what does the reader get from this article and how am I helping them.
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As these people have said it depends on the content, though I use a rule of thumb from the journalism days:
If you're reporting on something, that is something happened (e.g. new iPhone launch, founder of InvisibleChildren caught masturbating in public) it's usually only 250-500 words.
If you're explaining something, that is teaching a new concept from scratch, I'm usually comfortable with around 1,000 words.
If you're commenting on something or editorializing it can be anything in between depending.
This obviously has exceptions, I find that technology matters have shallow reports for example whereas social science/phenomena are generally longer.
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The best way to stink up a great article is to foist an arbitrary wordcount onto the author.
If the author is finished and still needs 300 words then he is going to bullshit and blather to reach your goal. Yes, that BS will have an odor.
If the author reaches the wordcount and still has a lot to say then you just might have lost the web's most authoritative content in that niche.
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Enough words to give a better explanation than your competitor, and to make people want to link to your page. This isn't an exact science, but it's like I had teachers tell me -- write until it is done.
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