How Long or Short Should a Web Content Be
It has long been a contention that the longer the article, the heavier the content, the more important it is to search engines. But if you dig into the dirt like we do here, you’ll be surprised with the kind of things we find….under the carpet. Many copywriters out there would cut your throat by saying that you need at least 1200 words in an article in order to make it work with the search engines. They tell you that because they want your money. Hey, freelance web content writers have to eat too…and can’t say I blame them.
Longer is not always better for article marketing
But the truth is that your web content does not have to be long. Web content writers like us are often very particular about keyword density. Keyword density is important because this is how many times preferred keywords appear in the article. You do this by taking the number of times the keyword appeared in the article, divide it over the total number of words in the article and then multiply it by a hundred. This way, you’ll get a percentage. There’s no definite answer to what percentage is perfect for search engine marketing! That’s the trouble but through a lot of people’s testing and experimenting, the article marketing community, in general, have come to the conclusion that 5% density is OK but we should not attempt to except the 8% density mark.
Short is not better either
However, on the flip side of things, a 200-word article is complete rubbish unless you call it ‘tip of the day’ or something to that effect. I fail to see the point in publishing a 200 word web content and call it an interesting article! Well, there are exceptions to every rule, of course, and the exception is that you write the article in such a way that everything is condense, trimmed down or maybe put in point-form which eliminates the need for wordy sentences.
Striking right between the eyes
Search engines, as far as I can see, would like articles and web content to be something in-between. Now, suffice to say that the ‘in-between’ is a very vague and testy definition as to length of article. Like I said earlier, a 200 word article is nonsense on the Internet but having an 800 word article is too long too. So, in my personal opinion, striking in between would be like writing and publishing an article of about 450 – 550 words in total.
Pack as much information as you can into the article
You should always make every conscious effort possible to pack as much information as possible into the article. Readers love it, search engines love it, you get some fans, people come back, your traffic increases and you get some business….everybody wins! Avoid repeating the same point over and over again. Not only is this annoying to the readers, you might start repeating the keywords too much and fall into the trap we call ‘keyword spamming’ which means that there is an overload of the same keyword(s) within the same article. Search engines don’t like keyword spamming and we don’t either.
Avoid it like the plague.
Happy writing,
Marsha
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