Is there such a thing as the optimum length of content or a specified word count a page needs to be to recieve beneficial search engine optimization results in Google?
The more content there is on your page, the more information the Google bots have to digest. You can help yourself greatly by using header tags in your websites coding. This is quite easy to do in wordpress sites, as this function is available in the wysiwig editor.
Use Your Keywords
It’s obviously very important to use the keyword in your H1 headings and in the content on your page. You generally can’t rank exceptionally well with a keyword unless it appears in your pages content. Many people actually fail to do this when they are designing or adding content to their websites.
It is recommended that you only target 2 keywords at most per page, and there is a logical reason to do this. You don’t want to confuse the bots, the more keywords you also use per page actually dilutes the importance you are placing on each keyword.
Why pit your keywords against one another on the same page, when you can actually set them up on individual pages and laser target them as the main keywords you want ranked?
It doesn’t make logical sense. Google ranks pages individually and this is not based entirely on what your domain as a whole is ranking for. If you are in a very competitive industry it’s more beneficial to only target 1 -2 keywords per page. Competitive keywords take a lot of work. You have to get the back linking and the on page seo strategy just right. After this you can still wait a long time to rank for a particular keyword. In these situations it will be better targeting less keywords per page rather than more.
Restrict Your Keyword Targeting
If you were in the memory foam mattress industry for instance. There are numerous sizes of mattresses, king size, double, single, super king size. This is an extremely competitive industry. Even Tesco’s and Amazon are now selling memory foam mattresses. So if you were going to target all these terms on your home page you would have a hard time ranking for one or any of these phrases.
But if you were to target memory foam mattresses on your home page, then create another for King size memory foam mattresses, and another to target the phrase double memory foam mattress you will stand more chance of ranking for all of these phrases if you are conducting an effective seo campaign.
Content Length Requirements
Post Panda (Google Algo updates that started Jan 2011) the emphasis is now on quality. Google bot is now good at checking the quality of an article and this has a big part to play in your rankings today. The article can detect bad grammar, and as already said time and again on this blog and many others so there’s no need to PREACH IT – don’t use duplicate content.
It’s better to have a short concise to the point article rather than a rambling post that is full of filler and repeated content. But apart from a search engine’s point of view if you have crappy content your visitors will not be engaged and they will leave your site, thus null and voiding any gains you have made through seo.
You need enough content to engage your audience, but break it down into bite size chunks and provide links to more detailed reports and full length articles on your site for the more enthusiastic reader.
Bounce Rates
Another reason you need great content is to minimize your bounce rate. If you have a high bounce rate Google can penalize your site as providing either low quality content or a bad user experience. A bad user experience can be caused by low quality content or site design issues. If you have Flash that causes load up issues on certain web browsers for instance that can cause your visitors to click the back button, or go back to Google.
This is called a bounce – when someone gets to your page and isn’t engaged and they quickly press the back button or type in an address into the search bar they are “bouncing” off your page. If this happens a lot then your site can be penalized.
Analytics
That’s why it’s important to have an analytics programme installed on your website that tells you the bounce rate. If this is low it means your audience appreciates your content and web design. If it is high it means your content or site design has issues, or else the visitor came to your site expecting info on a topic but couldn’t find it (site structure & navigational issues may be poor or cluttered), or the keywords you are targeting aren’t reflective of your content – or you just don’t have enough content related to some of your keywords you are getting traffic from.
Analytics and keyword research + content + site design (usually the less complex the better) make for a lethal concoction of search engine optimization success.
