How Many Words in Content for Good SEO?
-
I have heard it's best to have 400+ words of content for strong SEO per page. I believe this is true for the most.
I have a project in mind, however, that I am considering doing 100-200 words of content per page. This is for a glossary of terms for my industry, where I have a unique page for each term that describes what that term means w/ 1 image and a few links to related products.
Is having just 100-200 words going to be enough? Each page will still be unique, original content.
Or is it best to really try for longer articles?
In other words, is there a general rule for # of words per page for search engines to see the page as valuable and unique and to give it good ranking?
- Give me a BIG THUMBS UP if you found this question useful. It won't cost you anything! Thanks!
-
This site gets a lot of image search traffic. I can not tell you if the captions assist with that traffic. But I do know that kickass images on a same-topic page will get traffic.
-
I have a hunch that part of the Google Algo is how long people spend on a page, and lots of big pretty pictures along with text entices people to look at said pretty pictures thus stay on each page longer while reading.
-
Very informative on the added content getting long tail traffic. How did the images help though? Was it just the "content captions"?
Utah Tiger
-
Thanks, EGOL. That confirms what I'm thinking.
You mentioned image captions. I don't normally use them - do they help? I'm assuming this is for blog posts if its captions?
-
Just saying what happened here...
I had about 80 pages about topics that are similar to glossary entries.
I tossed them up with an image and two sentences. That was 3 or 4 years ago. Some of them ranked on the second or third page of google and they pulled a little traffic. Not much traffic a few visitors per day for most of the pages.
Then, after a year or two I started upgrading them to a couple paragraphs and one or two nicer, larger images with captions. Within a couple of months rankings went up (I don't build links on this site). Some of them were on the first page of google but most not. Traffic shot up like a rocket. Not that much from a ranking increase but because now there were lots more words on those pages and they interacted with queries to bring lots of long tail visitors. The result was each of these pages started pulling a few dozen visitors each day.
Now, I am slowly upgrading these pages to articles of 500 to 3000 words and three to twelve images with generous captions, some with data tables some with a video. Rankings on the ones that I have improved moved up significantly and are now in the top 5 of google. Traffic on the pages that I have improved now hits a few hundred visitors per day per page. I am working on another one today.
Bottom line... When compared to trivial content, substantive content pulls in lots more long tail traffic and will sometimes rank a little better on the basis of the richer content alone. An investment in richer content will immediately increase your traffic.
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
-
Best Way to Create SEO Content for Multiple, International Websites
I have a client that has multiple websites for providing to other countries. For instance, they have a .com website for the US (abccompany.com), a .co.uk website for the UK (abccompany.co.uk), a .de website for Germany (abccompany.de), and so on. The have websites for the Netherlands, France, and even China. These all act as separate websites. They have their own addresses, their own content (some duplicated but translated), their own pricing, their own Domain Authority, backlinks, etc. Right now, I write content for the US site. The goal is to write content for long and medium tail keywords. However, the UK site is interested in having myself write content for them as well. The issue I'm having is how can I differentiate the content? And what is the best way to target content for each country? Does it make sense to write separate content for each website to target results in that country? The .com site will still show up in UK web results still fairly high. Does it make sense to just duplicate the content but in a different language or for the specific audience in that country? I guess the biggest question I'm asking is, what is the best way of creating content for multiples countries' search results? I don't want the different websites to compete with each other in a sense nor do I want to spend extra time trying to rank content for multiple sites when I could just focus on trying to rank one for all countries. Any help is appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cody1090 -
Duplicate content - how to diagnose duplicate content from another domain before publishing pages?
Hi, 🙂 My company is having new distributor contract, and we are starting to sell products on our own webshop. Bio-technology is an industry in question and over 1.000 products. Writing product description from scratch would take many hours. The plan is to re-write it. With permission from our contractors we will import their 'product description' on our webshop. But, I am concerned being penalies from Google for duplicate content. If we re-write it we should be fine i guess. But, how can we be sure? Is there any good tool for comparing only text (because i don't want to publish the pages to compare URLs)? What else should we be aware off beside checking 'product description' for duplicate content? Duplicate content is big issue for all of us, i hope this answers will be helpful for many of us. Keep it hard work and thank you very much for your answers, Cheers, Dusan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Volusion SEO
I have an SEO setting on our Volusion e-commerce store enabled, it is titled "Enable full URL for Home Page Canonical Link (include /default.asp)" I am questioning whether or not this should be enabled for optimal SEO performance. Can anyone provide any advice on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PartyStore0 -
If a website trades internationally and simply translates its online content from English to French, German, etc how can we ensure no duplicate content penalisations and still maintain SEO performance in each territory?
Most of the international sites are as below: example.com example.de example.fr But some countries are on unique domains such example123.rsa
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dave_Schulhof0 -
SEO issues with Magento
Hi Everyone, We use Magento CMS for our site and we are having a frustrating time resolving our SEO issues. The site was very poorly managed in years past and in the past year I have redesigned and cleaned up many things. However we are recently having trouble with indexing and keyword ranking. Issue #1: Our main keyword ranking has dropped quite a bit while our other less important keywords have steadily risen. I suspect a very strict robots.txt implemented back in early January may have been the culprit. We have since been modifying it with out much luck. Many of our pages are still blocked. 12/05/12 : ranked 12th 1/09/13: ranked 19th 1/16/13: ranked 35th Now: out of top 50 (52nd) Issue #2: Not a single image is being indexed. We are 0 for 582 according to Webmaster tools. Not sure why... Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated as I have great determination and interest in learning the correct way to fix/do this. Site: www.scojo.com Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | t_parrish0 -
Websites with same content
Hi, Both my .co.uk and .ie websites have the exact same content which consists of hundreds of pages, is this going to cause an issue? I have a hreflang on both websites plus google webmaster tools is picking up that both websites are targeting different counties. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Duplicate Content Question
My client's website is for an organization that is part of a larger organization - which has it's own website. We were given permission to use content from the larger organization's site on my client's redesigned site. The SEs will deem this as duplicate content, right? I can "re-write" the content for the new site, but it will still be closely based on the original content from the larger organization's site, due to the scientific/medical nature of the subject material. Is there a way around this dilemma so I do not get penalized? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mills1 -
How to seo : two domain having exactly the same content
Target website in question is ikt.co.id,it is hosted in our server located in US, what I am going to do right now is create a new subdomain id.ikt.co.id that served EXACTLY the same content but it is hosted in our Indonesia server. Whenever people go to any page within ikt.co.id, it will detect their country, if they are from Indonesia, I will redirect them to our Indonesia server. Okay, from SEO point of view I know there are couple problems such as Content duplication, and perhaps there are more. I think to handle the content duplication I can cannonical all URL on id.ikt.co.id to the ikt.co.id version instead. The same thing for social sharing, all links shared will be the one from ikt.co.id, so all of those link juices go to ikt.co.id, and for good measure I can also set the robots.txt to tell them not to index id.ikt.co.id ... All sounded good to me, until the I became paranoid and start thinking "have I missed anything that might hurt my SERP" ? here is the question, did i miss something important, if i did could you please tell me what it is and if possible brought the solution you think might work into this discussion?? Again thanks a lot for your help 😃
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IKT0