Now, another common misunderstanding when it comes to creating posts and content on a WordPress website involves post length.
This confusion probably comes from the fact that WordPress was originally used as personal blogging software. Since it is still called a blog, many people believe it should be used for posting very short snippets of information. In most cases, the traditional blog format involved creating content which was a little longer than the current twitter tool which has become so popular. Twitter allows up to 140 characters per Tweet. In Word press of course there is no limit to how long your content can be, but when you look at it like a blog you may assume that your post should only be about 50 to a hundred words. Blogs were traditionally brief.
Since WordPress is powerful enough to be used for so many other types of professional websites however, that brief approach is not always applicable. In fact, for good search engine optimization, longer is actually better.
You see, search engines still rely on the text of the page for most of their interpretation as to what that page is about. The less readable text you have, the less material search engines have to try and figure out what you’re talking about.
When you create an article which only contains a few hundred words, you’ll find it is very difficult to work in key words and phrases, let alone related keywords and phrases for your topic. When your content is this short, you can only optimize that content for a few words or phrases at most.
When you create much longer content however, your possibilities open much wider. Writing a 1500 word article about one specific topic will provide a rich variety of key words, phrases, and relevant related content too. When you write that much in one article you naturally and automatically create a very topic rich website page that the search engines will happily munch away on in ways you might not even imagine. When the search engine visits that page it finds a huge variety and combination of relevant and related topic focused words and phrases, all of that content helps the search engine understand the topic of the page much more quickly, and helps it rank you for many related topics and phrases.
When you write short entries you are limiting the number of different ways that website page can be ranked in a search engine. When you expand your content and write long or at least reasonably sized articles, you increase your search engine ranking potential exponentially.
Mixing it up is best. Remember, search engines want natural human made content that is useful and relevant. It’s okay to decide that most of your content will contain approximately 500 words, or approximately a thousand words. Don’t try to make it exactly 500 words every single time however, and don’t agonize about posting short little information bits, and long detailed items occasionally too.
In other words, don’t over analyze everything you do. Just make it natural, and if possible try to provide as much keyword rich on topic words per page as you can naturally.
Don’t forget to weave and links throughout your content to other related sections or pages and posts on your site, and make sure you occasionally link to other related sites as well.
This is an excerpt from WordPress Search Engine Success, click here to read more.
