Dear Kalena
I am searching the web looking for an idea of how to redo my mortgage site.
I plan on optimizing many pages of content and am finding out that local SEO companies that are placing high on search rankings barely have 150 or so words of body text- and that is on the home page. I thought the 250 words minimum was a “black and white” rule. Is there some kind of exception to this? If there is, it sure will make my life easier.
Alistair
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Hi Alistair
Guess what? No rules in SEO are black and white.
200-250 words of text was actually just a rough guide that my friend (and SEO rockstar) Jill Whalen came up with over 10 years ago when she began optimizing web sites.
It’s just a lot easier to integrate keywords naturally into 2 or 3 paragraphs of text than it is to squeeze them into 1 paragraph of text. Why make it difficult for yourself? Give yourself more room to add keywords and feed search engines what they need to survive – text.
That said, if you believe you can naturally squeeze all the keywords you need into 150 words and still have your home page text sound logical and natural to read – then go for it!
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Are we writing for the search engines and maybe the occasional visitor will stop by for a read; or are we writing to offer ideas, opinions and strategies that are valuable to our readers? If we do that well then the search engines will respect the material we publish.
A well written article is much more likely to encourage a human visitor to read and return. Isn’t that our real goal?
I agree there is no rule on the optimum number of words in a post. It is much more important to provide good content than worry about the number of words. That approach only brings back nightmares of school assignments. The extra words I added did nothing to improve the quality of my writing.
You made a great point Chris, the main focus should always be people.
Here’s my approach as a Designer:
For blogs, it’s ok to have a lengthy frontpage because people go on there to read.
For other websites, I like the google approach, clean and appealing frontpage with a nice menu at the top.
Shiller