I just wanted to share I completely agree with EGOL and the understanding he shared. I skipped responding to this question because I didn't want to respond with all the explanation of the disclaimers, where EGOL tackled the question anyway and offered great details in both the original reply and follow up.

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.

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.

Hi Alison.

Your issue is common and no, there should not be any problems IF you properly configure both sites as follows:

1. Set your geographic target for the .com site to US and the .com.au site to Australia. This is inferred but it is best to specify in your case.

2. Use the language meta codes in your headers. EN-US for the US site and EN-AU for the Australian site.

3. You already mentioned using the correct currency on the Australian site. You also should ensure all other units of measurement are adjusted. For example, miles vs kilometres, etc.

4. Spelling should be changed as appropriate. For example, center vs centre.

5. Word choices should be adjusted for Australian culture. Australians might say "Prices are much dearer" where an American wont understand what that means. In the US one would say "Prices are much higher".

Your hosting is fine from a SEO standpoint as long as the pages load quickly. I have worked with people from Australia before and there is a noticeable difference in page load speeds, especially when working with detailed images such as large images of smiles and teeth. I would recommend using YSlow, PageSpeed or other tools and determining your page load speed from Australia. If it is slow, consider hosting in Australia.