SEO page length 4500+ words
-
I have read varying discussions on this... some say it is good or rather it does not really matter (as long as not stuffed with keywords) and some say more than 1000+ words is bad!
I have a travel site and I want to add an historical page about the zone. It is very interesting (very organic, not written for SEO purposes as such). It adds flavor and details to a site that is really all about sales.
Does anyone have an opinion whether this is detrimental to SEO or not?
-
Article length should not matter. Just make it attractive and readable to the user. There are many sites that provide good lengthy content but break it up into readable chunks. I particularly like this example on the Verge site whereby a lengthy piece is broken up into neat segments and there is a useful 'jump to' feature on the left hand side which acts almost as a teaser to the content.
-
Here are the things that rule my content development
-
Do not pay attention to length. Write enough to cover the subject well, completely and in a very interesting way. If you decide that I need 1000 words or 300 words or 5000 words - that is how you stink up a great article.
-
Publish lots of nice images with your content. Splurge your budget on them. Don't worry about the bandwidth. Those images will be great for your visitor.
-
Break up an article with lots of logical segments and communicate that with bold headings. Lots of people scan an article for the headings and read the parts that are interesging to them.
-
Don't break a nice article across many pages - especially if you have lots of great images. You want people who land on your article to say WOW! Look at thoseimages... look at all of the interesting subheadings. I am going to read this and share with my friendsd. People don't want too click through six pages to read your article. They don't.
-
-
Here's a post from last week that specifically addresses your question, Rose, and includes some hard data.
http://www.detailedsuccess.com/perfect-blog-post-length/
I usually find mixing up the length of posts a bit to be useful, but there's absolutely no question that good-quality, well laid-out long posts can be very successful both as far as entertaining readers and for attracting links (especially from social media.) - both of which make for good SEO.
I've never yet heard anybody who claims "more than 1000 words is bad" back up that claim with any sort of believable, provable argument.
Paul
-
yes, there are many options, always depending on how well are you able to maintain the page load time efficient. I think that having everything in one page without making it boring or overwhelming for the user is the best choice.
About images be sure that you're uploading he images in the size you're using without scaling them with css, because a 10001000 image even if shown as 100100 always weights as a 10001000, so rescale it and upload it as 100100.
-
So really if I keep the photos small or limited to reduce load time this would be ok.
Good to know. I thought about doing it on a few pages and labeling it:
1 history before 1960
2. political history etc
3. all on different URLs but it really disrupts the flow. Like I said it doesn't really have sales value but it is interesting and I want my site to be partly informational not just sales.
Thanks for your advice. It is amazing how many different options there is on this one subject!
-
Hi Rose, as far as I can remember Matt Cutts always says: "build your website for your users not for the search engines". In that sense you should have a look at your new content as an user of your site and imagine if he would benefit from it or not. If you think that the content is useful, than it's definitely better to publish it.
So SEO doesn't decides if this article is valuable or not, but structures it in the way you would benefit the best. I think that it would be useful to have it on one unique URL. Any link you may achieve will point to the same page, and with a wise usage of internal anchors you'll obtain a quite interesting user navigation. What it may create you problems is the page loadtime, 1000+ words is not detrimental to SEO but it could be if the page load time goes up a lot. So use wisely your images and optimize them in order to get a faster response.
Always point to add more flavour to the site, because you want users to return not to only buy something and leave.
-
It won't hurt your site if that's what you are asking. Will it rank well? Really depends on how your organic writing style relates to SEO. Is it broke up into sections? Do those sections of decent headers? Are their pictures? Are the pictures named appropriately?
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
-
Referring subdirectory pages from 3rd hierarchy level pages. Will this hurts?
Hi all, We have product feature pages at 3rd tier like website.com/product/features. We have the help guides for each of these features on a different subdirectory like website.com/help/guides. We are linking these help guides from every page of features. So, will it hurts us anywhere just because we are encouraging 4th tier pages in website, moreover they are from different sub-directory. Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Avg Page Load Time Increase After Responsive Web Design
The Avg. Page Load Time has been steadily increasing after our website went responsive. What could have cause this?
Web Design | | JMSCC1 -
SEO with Webflow CMS (webflow.com)?
Some friends of mine are having their site redesigned. The designer is using Webflow, which appears to be a visual drag-and-drop designer. Has anyone come across Webflow before? How is it for SEO? I'm not typically pleased with visual designers for SEO, but maybe somebody's had experience and thinks it's fine.
Web Design | | justin-brock0 -
Internal Linking: What is the best practice for pages not included in Nav bar?
I never quite understood why internal linking was such a big deal for SEO, but now I'm having second thoughts and perhaps understanding it more. I always thought since most websites have a navigation feature--usually the menu bar located at the top and often another one in the footer--that internal navigation was usually already built in to most websites and therefore, a silly topic to make a fuss over; however, I may be the silly one after all. I am now creating pages that are not included in the navigation so.... What is the best practice for this? If I am creating say, pages for certain locations and those location pages begin to number in the hundreds, it makes my navigation bar a little too cumbersome to have all those pages in a drop down menu. So I made a Locations page and just link to all those pages from that page (and from nowhere else). But now I'm wondering if this could be a bad internal linking practice and perhaps hurt my online visibility as an SEO ranking factor. Is this a crawl problem? And if so, is there a better option that provides a good visitor experience while appeasing the search engines.
Web Design | | Dino640 -
No-index part of page
Hi All, I want to copy articles from CNN/Bloomberg/etc and I want to show the content to my users in Lightbox (CSS), but the problem is duplicate content. Do you have any idea how can I no-index part of page/content?
Web Design | | JohnPalmer0 -
Content Migration & cost of moving pages
Hope you are all having a great day! I am wondering if anyone would be able to provide general feedback. I work for a medium size company in Chicago. Currently our site is static html and we are seeking to migrate to Wordpress. After speaking with a number of website companies and receiving proposals, I am trying to understand if there is an approximate going rate or range for moving content from static html to a CMS like Wordpress? i.e. a cost per page? We don't have any dynamic content. Most of our pages are text and images. The site itself, including the blog is around 220 pages. Thanks in advance for any insight or resources!
Web Design | | SEOSponge0 -
SEO and Server Connectivity....
Good Morning/Evening Mozzers, I arrive at work this morning with 5 emails from GWT for my separate domains reading, **"Googlebot can't access your site - **Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 39 errors while attempting to connect to your site. Your site's overall connection failure rate is 15.1%." I have passed this on to the Web Dev team to resolve ASAP. My Question, will server connectivity issues harm my rankings? Is there a danger if this continues that URL's could be de-indexed? Input would be greatly appreciated.
Web Design | | RobertChapman0 -
Word Press Seo Errors/ Questions
Hi my name is Tina I am new here I hope you guys can help me out. I thought building my new site with Word Press was going to simplify things, however I have a ton of errors, and I am not sure what they are, or how to fix them. I am hoping someone could share with me a solution for these errors. I have 28 rel=canonical errors, I am not sure what this means, I understand it to mean my pages are similar, and this is to set a heirarchy between my pages. Please correct me if I am wrong. If I am correct would this be necessary to add if my main keyword was "widgets" and my home page was optimized for "widgets" and my next page was "blue widgets" and so on. While my pages are similar they are all optimized for different versions of my main keyword some using long tail keywords. Do you know of a plugin that can help solve this problem? Also does anyone have a plugin they recommend for G+ my G+ authorship verification is causing an error as well? I am using Head Space 2 I have used this seo plugin numerous times with great success it has been my favorite seo plugin. However, we have a portfolio that shows our clients websites, and on those pages Head Space will not let me enter a description tag. What plug in do you guys recommend with more control over each page? Another interesting issue is on one of our pages I optimized it for our Canadian clients, and now every page has been listed in Google.ca for the keywords it should have on Google.com. We are listed on Google maps, verified in Google places, and our address is on the site so they know we're from the USA however, the majority of our keywords are only listed in Google.ca. We're on page one for all of them, we are in the top three on most of them so that's not bad, but we want to be listed in Google.com as well. Any suggestions on this?
Web Design | | TinaGammon1