One of a regular blog post series for the 'blog' page of a digital marketing company:
When it comes to blog posts, articles, and even just page content in general, size does matter. It is essential to ensure that the text on any given page is long enough – but also, not too long. There are some good reasons for this, which are mostly linked to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and reader experience.
For blog posts, your text should be longer than on your Category pages. These are the pages on your website that will link all the posts with a common category or tag. As the content on these pages doesn’t require as much detail as a blog post or article, the text won’t need to be as long. Nevertheless, it is still recommended that these pages contain at least 250 words. This is a great opportunity to include key words to help your page rank on search engines such as Google.
Search Engines Consider Longer Texts to be More Valuable
Blog posts or articles should contain more text than Category pages. This is because search engines consider pages with small amounts of content as of little value. After all, the role of search engines like Google, is to supply the web browser with the most useful page for their search term. This will most often be a page with a good amount of information, which matches with the browser’s key search words.
Pages with less text will often be considered as ‘thin content’ by search engines. Pages with non-original, or duplicate content are also deemed ‘thin content’. So, if you want your blog post or article to attract visitors to your site, one of the more effective (and easy) things you can do is make sure you have a decent amount of original content for them to read.
A Longer Text Gives More Opportunity to Include Key Words
When writing a longer blog post or article, you will naturally be provided with more opportunities to rank for your chosen topics. You will have more chance to include key words and phrases related to your subject and will probably end up doing so without even having to think about it.
What’s more, it will also increase your chance of ranking for other key words you might not have picked out. Long tail variants of your chosen key words and topics will certainly begin to crop up as your post becomes longer and more informative. This will help to improve the visibility of your post through search engines, making it more likely that visitors will discover it.
A Long Text Also Gives More Opportunity to Become Boring
Despite earlier stating that writing a longer post can be one of the easiest ways to help your page rank in search engines, it isn’t always as easy as it sounds. If you are writing about an unfamiliar topic, or one that doesn’t seem to give you much to work with, writing a “long enough” article can sometimes seem impossible.
If your blog post or article is too short, then chances are, it won’t rank as well in search engines. However, having a blog post which is too long can also be negative. Longer passages of text can easily cross the line from informative, to boring, and it requires some skill to prevent this from happening. When a visitor comes to your site and finds a long and boring post, they will probably leave and not be in a hurry to come back.
Producing a piece of text that is both long enough, and enjoyable for your visitors to read is the challenge of writing valuable blog posts and articles. However, when done effectively, having informative content on your website can attract more visitors, who may then be tempted to explore the rest of your site. The added effort or cost to achieve this is definitely worth it.
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