Simple question: How many words optimal for blog posts
-
Hello,
We're adding a blog to one of our sites.
How many words should be in a blog post for it to be optimal for the search engines? If it varies from industry to industry, please give a couple of examples.
We were going to do 500 words but that seems a bit long.
Thanks!
-
Does the same thing apply to regular articles?
Yes. Word count should be based on one primary question, how many words would it take to properly discuss the topic. If the topic is "What is the definition of...." then the word count can be quite small such as 100 words. If the topic is "Cardiomyopathy Risk Assessment" or any technical topic the word count can easily exceed 1000.
The judgement you exercise is when to pull back or expand upon various tangent topics. For a dictionary page, you could include a lot more then the definition such as synonyms, antonyms, thesaurus matches, origin of the word, examples in sentences, etc. For the Cardiomyopathy topic, you can greatly reduce the word count by offering additional pages on various tangent topics. One page can focus causes, another cures, another definition, etc.
-
Hey everyone,
This makes perfect sense. We'll focus on the quality of the blog post and not necessarily on making it long for the long tail.
Does the same thing apply to regular articles?
I'll close this soon. Thanks!
-
As many as it takes to write a good piece on the given subject.
Pages do not need a lot of text to rank, Matt Cutts has stated. but having said that, the more text the more chance of long tails
-
I don't disagree with any of the other answers, but I have to say the target should always be 250 words. Any less than that, and basically you don't have enough to say to warrant a post.
What I've found is that if I'm struggling to get up to 250, it means I need to think about it more and then when I come back to it I blow past 250 easily.
-
Write the content for the audience...there should be no minimums for superb content!
-
I totally agree, I have been asked this question a few times before and my answer is the metric for writing isn't length but are you the website owner answering the question the searcher is asking.
-
Setting a word count goal, quota or limit is a great way to mess up a great blog post.
The topic, your audience and your expertise should determine the length of the post.
-
I'm afraid there is no answer to that question. Here is why.
Each blog article you offer will cover a specific topic. More specifically, the article will focus one or more keyword phrases. The question search engines will decide is which web page is most likely to satisfy a user's query for that phrase.
If your article topic is "Houseism defined" then 100 words is probably enough. You could expand the article to 1000+ words by offering examples, explaining the history of the term, share instances where a House-ism was used in media outside of the television show House, etc.
The more content you share, the more thorough your topic coverage is of the keyword BUT the more opportunities arise to go off topic or dilute your message.
How many words should be in a blog post for it to be optimal for the search engines?
Enough to fully cover the specific keyword phrase target of the page. Always examine the top 5 SERPs for the target phrase. Search results are a competition. Some low quality articles rank as #1 and other high quality articles can't break the top 3 due entirely to competition.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
old posts / delete or update Big Site with more than 6000 articles
Hi, my site is related to education and i published more than 6000 articles from last 10 years, i naver delete but frequently update the Good Articles but some old articles that is not giving visitors, i did not update and some of them are short articles. i started in year 2021 and many articles in year 2012 to 2023 i write. please check my site and advise can i delete old out dated articles ? and countinue writing new articles with same topics, actuly from last month of August 2023 my site visitors lost with time from more than 70 percent.
Content Development | | bedah
thank so much for advise.
can i delete out dated content?
some of my contents are not ranking even i update before it was on top position but now even after update still other website is ranking more than me in current year.
#old Content ?
#update or delete?0 -
How do I get more traffic for my blog?
Hi there, I would like to know how to work on my blog to get more organic traffic. Thanks!!
Content Development | | lucywrites1 -
Best Practices for Recurring Blog Topics
Our site has annual articles (such as a payment calendar and an announcement of our annual conference). Is it better to keep all the old blog articles available and searchable, redirect them to the most current year's entry, or something else entirely? My instinct is to have a permanent redirect to the newest article.
Content Development | | GwenKestrel1 -
Advice on how to handle Guest Blogging between multiple brands
How to you manage your guest blogging efforts between companies. I blog for 4 different companies, and just started….I am confused if I should blog as myself, or should each company have an "author" set up, and then guest blog under each author? I want their website to get better rankings, and the brand to get more engagement. I am not concerned about myself and my authorship rating….but should I be? Would that be more beneficial to have all blogs tied to me, to help with engagement. Or am I shooting myself in the foot by not increasing my authorship. What's more important? Authorship or blogging about the relevant content from the author that makes the most sense? Just looking for tips from anyone that has to blog under different brands. How do you do it?!?! (also, looking into myguestblog plugin)
Content Development | | cschwartzel0 -
Optimising my ecommerce blog
Hey guys, I am after suggestions on how i can better optimise my blog? www.imrubbish.co.uk/blog I have been getting regular blog posts up until say a month ago. Looking to get a new writer and get 3-4 blog posts a week done. Sometimes targeting products, sometimes general chat about bins. I am hoping you kind people can make a couple of suggestions i could be doing. Thank you
Content Development | | imrubbish0 -
Should I Have No Index, No Follow On Blog Category & Tag Pages?
At some point in the past I read or was told that No Index, No Follow tags on category and tag pages were a good thing on a standard WordPress blog in order to prevent duplicate content issues. Is this still true or was it ever true?
Content Development | | eTundra0 -
Question about Google News Sitemap
I'm submitting my site to Google News, have a few questions for creating my sitemap. The majority of my articles (800) are in a category called 'Disability News' (which is one of my main keywords). Around half of these posts are we're automated RSS feed posts (first 200 words of an article directly copied with a link thru to the original). The past few weeks I've been posting tons of unique content so I was thinking about moving all duplicate content into a category called 'Syndicated News' and excluding that from my Google News sitemap. Is this advisable? or should I just leave it as is?
Content Development | | craven220 -
Duplicate Content on WordPress Blogs?
We are getting ready to add a WordPress blog to our established website. Our plans are to place it in a subfolder on our website to maximize rank. My question is...Do we need to utilize a Meta Robots WordPress plugin by Yoast or similar so that noindex,follow robots meta tags will prevent search engine indexing of search result pages, subpages and category archives? We want to avoid the dreaded Duplicate Content Error and penalty. Any other great SEO WordPress plugins? Thank you for your time. Brian
Content Development | | gw3seo0