Article

Page Length For Search Engines

by Joyce Lewis

You´ve decided to create content for your web pages, but aren´t sure how many words each page should have to ensure that search engines and visitors come back often. You don´t want to have too few words, but you don´t want to have too many words, either. It´s a delicate balance that every web site owner has to know in order to have a site that is search engine optimized and visitor friendly.

What is a good length for pages?

Ideally, each page should have at least 700 words, but no more than 1500 words. Anything less than 700 words and search engine spiders might just skip over your site entirely; anything more than 1500 and spiders won’t take the time to search through the content for keywords.

How do I please search engine bots?

Pleasing search engine bots is as simple as having 700+ words of content and some keywords sprinkled into your content. In a document of 700 words, you’ll want to have at least 7 keywords, but preferably around 21. When using keywords, make sure to sprinkle them naturally throughout the document so that you do not distract your reader from what the content is about.

Why should I have pages with content between 700 and 1500 words?

The reasons for this are simple. Having pages with content of 700-1500 words will please visitors and search engine spiders. Pleasing both will help your site attract more traffic.

Visitors to your site want to see useful content. Good content is content that is worthwhile to read and tells the visitor something they don’t already know. It must be packed with information and details. Few can accomplish this in less than 700 words.

However, it is also important not to be too wordy. People want to be able to get the content they need quickly. They don’t want to read through hundreds of words of fluff in order to get what they came for.

Spiders who come to your site want to have a good amount of content to “chew” on. That is, they want to have enough content to report back to the search engine database. Less than 700 words really isn’t enough content for a spider to take back to a search engine database.

Spiders, much like human visitors, also don’t like pages with excessive amounts of words. Pages with 1500 words are usually a big turnoff to spiders, and even if a spider does visit the page, chances are they won’t report the contents of the page back to the search engine database for which they work. That is why you must strive to be concise not just for human visitors, but for the robot(spider) visitors as well.

If you are able to limit your pages to between 700 and 1500 words, you will do well with human visitors and search engine spiders. That’s the goal of every web site owner.

posted on Jun 26, 2007

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