Understanding Word Count

Obviously, word count alone won’t determine your search ranking, but it may be one of many factors to consider when writing for optimization.  To understand what works, consider successful sites in your industry and follow their example. We can learn a lot from modeling industry leaders – how do they use keywords?, do H1 tags matter?, and how long are their posts?  By doing so, we hope to garner Best Practices to improve our work and ultimately increase traffic and conversion on our own sites.

First and foremost – you should write to provide value to the reader, not just to meet an arbitrary word count goal.   Simply getting someone to your page shouldn’t be your goal, it should be getting them to stick around once they’ve found you.  If they leave right away (bounce rate is when they look at one page and leave the site), this is a clue that  your readers are not finding your content interesting or relevant to what they were searching for.  Your job then is to figure out if it’s your content or the relevancy of the keywords you used to attract them

Over at ViperChill – they took a look at Technorati’s Top 10 ranking blogs to see what makes them tick.  One of the areas touched on was word count – a question we get all the time – how long do my blog entries need to be? The average word count is 362.

Average Post Length

After establishing how many posts each blog tends to make on a daily basis, I then thought it would be interesting to see how long each of their posts are. I’ve already performed a similar analysis across different industries, but never one for the biggest blogs in the world.

• Highest Word Count: Huffington Post – 1,235
• Lowest Word Count: Gawker – 77
• Average Word Count: 362

Longer word count provides for more opportunity for keyword phrases and natural keyword density. But, before you start any blog consider your goal and write towards that goal.  What do you want the reader to do?  If you are providing content, it maybe that you are attempting to establish your site as a valued resource and a industry leader.  If you are trying to sell something, make sure there is a call to action, such as Buy Now! Don’t make your reader guess what it is that you want from them – tell them.

Never forgo value and relevancy simply for word count

Microsoft has launched its answer to Google. So far, Microsoft has not been able to break into the Google dominated search space, but knowing Microsoft they’re not likely to give up easy.

So, should you spend a lot of effort optimizing for Bing? Well, not until demonstrate some market share, but it couldn’t hurt to submit your site to Bing.

To submit your site to Bing:
To request that Bing crawl your site, submit your site’s domain to http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx.

To submit your Sitemap:
To submit an XML-based Sitemap for your site, copy and paste the below URL into the address bar of your browser–be sure to change “www.YourWebAddress.com” to your domain name–and then press ENTER:

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml

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For those of you following our little traffic ranking exercise -

When we started this exercise (9/22), Dohertyassoc.com had a Alexa traffic rank of: 3,740,178. In October, we had a traffic rank of 1,969,422, January 2009 was 1,183,946, April we had gotten to 869,376.

Currently Doherty’s traffic rank is 1,696,815

So what happened? We got busy, and let the website slide and lo and behold – no new content, traffic slips.

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Keyword density is how often your keywords show up in the text of your site. If they never show up – then the text and the keywords seem unrelated – if you over do it then it’s just a spam site.

But as poor Goldilocks found out – it’s not always easy to get it just right.

No more then 2-3% of you text should focus on one variation of a keyword or keyword phrase. Some people debate this and will say 4-5% and some will even go as far as 7%.

Google tends to like a lower keyword density, so err on the low side

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Here’s a great analysis of many SEO topics which shows the most important factors as ranked by a group of 37 experts.

Check it out – it might just be a good refresher http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

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