How much to write on a web page

What is the ideal length of Content on a web page

[Candid India]

Greetings to all Experienced members out there!

I have been into designing and not much into Optimisation. With the increasing demand for good rankings and a high PR, most of my clients have started asking for long pages and have started providing lenghty contents for the pages. Could any body suggest what should be an ideal length/no. of words on a web page.

[jbinbpt]

The quality of the content is a big factor in this. If the first 100 words don't interest the user, it doesn't matter how many you have. More words and lengthy articles don't mean they will be read.

General rule of thumb 500 to 700 words is more than enough with a maximum of around 1000 words.

[mack]

I think it all comes down the the quality of the content. Write your content with the user in mind. Don't try and make your articles longer then they need to be by adding useless fluff in-between the main text. Doing this will simply dilute the main topic of your article.

Aim to have a fairly well sized body of text within your page. Do not add to much content that the user needs to scroll down more than a page to read the article, if you are going to go beyond this then it may be a good idea to break your page up into 2 separate pages with a link at the bottom "Next page".

Mack.

[Candid India]

Thanks for your inputs and definitely I agree that the quality of content matters a lot.

Just wanted to clarify one more thing Mack, as per your suggestion of shifting the content on next page. As the visitors don't prefer to scroll is it the same with spiders/search engine crawlers also. I want to know whether the crawlers prefer more content on the same page or on different pages of the same site.

[mack]

Search engine spiders don't have a problem with articles being split over more than one age, in fact I have had pretty good luck with this. If you split it over 2 pages then each page has the chance to rank.

Mack.

[ridgway]

just my 2 cents, but i've found when text goes beyond 500 words or so, the instance of the user going to the "next" page begins to diminish. for seo puposes, 400 words seems to be a very comfortable number, in my limited experience. good luck.

[mariolosek]

In my opinion it is better to create short articles. It is better to create 2 short articles than one long (for spiders and humans).
It is only my opinion, because I am not so experienced user as other people who answered your question.

[Jim Catanich]

We had this very conversation (arguement) between programmers, content editors and seo types.

Programmers: Keep the page to under 30K in size. It loads faster.

Editors: Keep the page to the size of a page in a paper back book. ~580 words (no I won't count characters).

SEO: Good, more places to stuff keywords.

But as the dust settled...

Users do not like to scroll more than 1 more full page. That is were the 350 word recommendation came from. Keep the content word count to screen size.

Editors: I will have to make a clean transition between the pages

Programmers: I will have to add navigation to split this.

SEO: We are tuning the keyword density of that content to a targeted percentage. Having a fixed "content word count" helps.

So to split up 5000 words would require the Editor to find clean transitions at the 300 to 500 word mark that make sence. Then the programmer can apply navigation to it. And then the SEO can tune it.

The Editor must control this or else it will read poorly.

Jim Catanich
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[edited by: engine at 8:38 am (utc) on July 27, 2006]
[edit reason]
[1][edit reason] See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit] [/edit][/1]

[mariolosek]

Yes, it is difficult to find some kind of leverage between those factors. You have to take into the consideration, that reading in web is not similar to reading a book, it it similar to scanning a book. The most important is to tell the user in first 2-5 sentences, what is the article about. If you do it, then you will have no problems with search engines, length of articles and so on.

[webjourneyman]

Key for users is to make the text easy to read.

Keep all main content above fold. It is better that they have to click to next page than scroll down.

Have plenty white space in both margins.

Narrow columns are better than broad ones.

Use bullet lists as much as possible. It is better to write: This particular Tegdiw is:
* lorem
* ipsum
* dulorum
"
Than, "This particular Tegdiw is both lorem, ipsum and dulorum."

[moltar]

Some say it must fit into the viewport, I side with the idea, but don't follow it.