SEO Step By Step Guide– 147. Is there any word count required for ranking?

As we proceed with our website’s optimization, we will get a number of doubts and questions. These questions and concerns will help us fine-tune our optimization efforts and make it more effective. We should be concerned only when we are fully complacent with our SEO. One of the questions that is often faced by webmasters is regarding the word count required to rank well in search engines.

It is already been emphasized enough about the importance of content for Google. However, no one seems to advise us correctly on the length of the text that should in each page. Yes, it is because search engines did not put a figure on this. All that they require is original content that they can provide the internet users.

From our commonsense, we can deem that pages with skimpy content will find it hard to climb up the search results page. We can understand this well when we consider this in conjunction with the keyword density requirements. If we need to have good keyword density, then there should be reasonable amount of content in each page. Though there is not hard and fast rule, your web pages should have a minimum of 350 words per page. On the upper limit, anything over 1000 seem not to have any positive results. If you should foresee that your text length should overflow beyond 1000 words, you should add another page for the spill over content. This will give you some extra space and another page to optimize for the keywords that you cannot concentrate on the previous page.

If the length of the text is too short and if you attempt to increase the keyword repetition within the short text then the text will read awkward and keyword stuffing will be evident. Search engines penalize pages that are stuffed with keywords.

Rather than being worried about the number of words in each page try to spend more time on making your content unique. You may have 1000s of words in each page but with redundant content, then you are not going to go anywhere with your search engine placement. On the other hand if you have highly focused and unique content that concentrates on all the top keywords will take you a long way in climbing up the search engine results page.

Taking a peek at the keywords that are most widely searched using Google keyword tool will help you develop your content around those keywords. However, do not force the keywords in to the text but let it flow naturally. So the verdict here is rather than concentrate on word count concentrate on coming up with unique content.

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