Many people overlook an important element of proper SEO, which is how much content should go on a page for your website in order to be ranked highly. Of course, as with all areas of SEO, many people have many different opinions and thoughts regarding this matter. The end result that you should stick with will be different from someone else, because you will have your own specific needs, goals and concerns. Despite the differences that may arise though, there are a few concrete guidelines that you can follow.
Very generally, more content is better than less when it comes to getting your site ranked with SEO. A site with just a few words, or just a few sentences, isn’t going to be deemed as very valuable in the eyes of the search engines. For one thing it’s hard to make such a small amount of text unique, which is an important SEO ranking factor. For another thing, with just a few sentences of content, what is the purpose and value of the page?
Pages that provide solid, unique information get rewarded, and that’s another important SEO principle to remember. Even though more content is generally better than none, you don’t get rewarded for having worthless content. Stuffing your page with keywords and random text for example won’t get you ranked at all, and could even cause your rankings to take a hit as a result. Additionally, copying text and content from other websites and adding them to your own isn’t going to do you any good either.
Starting from these two basic SEO guidelines then, the question remains, how much text do you need on a page in order to get ranked highly? A starting point, serving as the bare minimum, should be approximately 250 words. 250 words will enable you to provide real value to your visitor, while showing the search engines that you are unique and provide content that is directly related with a particular set of keywords or topics. You should generally keep pages to 1,000 words or less as well. Too much text on one page is a turn off for visitors, and dividing larger pages into multiple smaller ones provides the added bonus of offering more landing pages for the search engines to pick up.
It’s really all about providing a satisfactory level of content, that meets the expectations both of search engines and the people who actually visit your website. If you get ranked highly with your SEO strategies, but fail to provide anything of real value, visitors won’t end up buying your product or taking any action that you wanted. Alternatively, with content that provides value but isn’t optimized with SEO, you’ll never gain any ground in the search engines.
So the more content you have the better, but the content you do have needs to be valuable and unique. Anybody can create a few hundred words of garbage by stuffing keywords or by copying somebody’s content. But you won’t be doing yourself any favors by following that path. Focus on providing unique, valuable and useful content that if nothing else crosses the bare minimum of threshold for text on a highly ranked SEO page.
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