A couple of entries ago, I suggested making things easy on yourself by writing shorter blog posts from time to time (or all the time if it fits your blog). PFincome mentioned that a lot of search engine optimization advice suggests longer posts or articles of 250-300+ words. So can short blog posts rank in the search engines?
As I said in the comments, my short answer is… sure. (Thought-provoking and eloquent, I know.)
Plenty of my short posts come up on the first page of search results for their keywords, and I bet you’ve stumbled on short posts from the big blogs such as Gizmodo or (one I come across a lot doing searches in my home improvement niche) Trendir. Many shopping or gadget blogs specialize in posting frequently and, er, shortly.
Sometimes posts on the popular blogs will be lengthened significantly by user comments, but in the case of Trendir, the site keeps comments turned off, so it certainly appears that short can work just fine.
So, why do many experts suggest longer pages?
My thought is that it can’t hurt, and it can help.
The more times a keyword phrase appears on a page (in the natural flow of sentences, not stuffed in there left and right until the page doesn’t make sense), the more weight the search engines may give your post in deciding where it should rank.
We don’t necessarily need to be thinking SEO with every blog post, though, and if writing short entries makes it easier for you to put out content on a regular basis, that may turn out to make your site more popular in the long run.
SEO and blogging
Unlike with article sites, a lot of bloggers don’t worry about SEO much on individual posts. This is either because a) they don’t care about/know about SEO or b) they prefer to build their sites organically and let the traffic gods judge their sites as they will.
I’m somewhere in the middle when it comes to blogging. I started out with SEO-based article sites and moved to blogging later, so SEO is usually in the back of my mind.
On my home improvement blog, I’ll usually try to put a likely keyword phrase in the title and sprinkle it throughout the post, if only out of habit. However if I’m promoting an affiliate product, where I’m actually hoping to make sales down the road, I’ll actually look up a keyword phrase to target (I stick to less searched and less competitive phrases for individual blog posts, since I rarely go on link-building campaigns for single posts), but for day-to-day writing, I’m often just putting things out there because they might interest folks and to keep the fresh content flowing.
I’ve found that a lot of time the posts like that (not specifically written with SEO in mind) sometimes do well and bring in quite a bit of traffic for a phrase I didn’t intentionally target, while the ones I worked harder at aren’t always winners.
In the blogosphere, what really helps is when an author of one of the big popular blogs happens to like something you wrote about and links to it just because. You can’t always predict what will win the natural links, and those are often the difference between popularity and obscurity for a specific blog post (whether you worried about SEO or not!).
8 responses so far ↓
1 pfincome // Apr 17, 2009 at 5:13 am
Thanks so much for the follow up on my question. Your breakdown of different sites and the type of posts you write on each helped a lot.
One of the problems I have a tendency to do on PFI is to start writing novels. I would say my average post is around 750 words with some going well over 1000 words. I have found that it takes me about 1.5 hours to write those posts. I am slowly trying to bring down my articles to 500 words with some even around 350.
Thanks for your help!
2 Carla // Apr 18, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Thanks for writing this! I have always wondered about that myself. I tend to write longer posts because I dont know how to break them up sometimes though I know its better when I post more often.
3 Steve // May 7, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Here is my question: Is it best to keep one post per page, so that you don’t end up getting many different keywords sprinkled all over the page. For example, do you work on making all your blog posts optimized to reflect the title of your blog in some way?
4 Sanjay // May 25, 2009 at 12:28 am
I have something for Steve. In my point of view, it doesn’t matter whether you keep one post per page or not. The thing is that you should create posts related to your targeted keywords. It is not necessary that you write the post with the exact keyword in the title and heading tags. But, hey! it is better to optimize all of your posts.
5 Kurt Evans // Sep 20, 2009 at 9:22 pm
I think it doesn’t really matter how long your post is. I think that as long as the content is interesting and can hold the reader’s attention; that, that should be enough. As long as it’s something worth of value that enriches people’s lives or gives them a new perspective on things.
6 sarah // Dec 9, 2009 at 11:55 pm
I guess it depends what kind of site you have. If it is an authority styled site then I would say just write what you want in however many words (on the theme of course) but if you are targeting a specific product or service and the site is going to be left to fend for itself soon after then you need to think about SEO …I think.
7 jason // Jan 26, 2010 at 1:50 pm
I try to think SEO with every post cause Im all about traffic but make it readable like you said. Remember a human being is gonna read it not a bot. But try to optimize as much as you can.
Great post thanks…..
8 Tom // Feb 21, 2010 at 5:12 am
I sometimes like to re-publish my articles/posts on article sites like EzineArticles, et al. For backlinks and all that, you know…
And some of those sites have a minimum word requirement of 450 per article.
So, short posts are fine, but if you plan to re-purpose your writing and syndicate it around the ‘web, it saves you some trouble if you keep ‘em 450+.
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