The Ideal Length of a Blog Post - Considering SEO

[Jason]

How to write longer blog posts (that your readers actually want to read!)

We all know that longer blog posts typically perform better in Google searches. But how do you write longer blog posts? And how do you write long-form blog posts in such a way that your readers will actually want to read them?

www.productiveblogging.com

What is your experience with this stuff? What do you feel is a good plan? How would you plan to tackle to the problem as far as effort and cost?

The Strategy​

Having a post of 1000 words is the bare minimum and what is said on the link is that it takes, usually, a very large amount with one source saying up to 2,500 words is the ideal.

 

[Empire]

The longer the content, the more chance a longtail keyword is what drove someone to the page in the first place. 1500 words as paragraphs of 5-6 sentences- probably not going to hold attention. 1500 words with statistics, links, short paragraphs, pictures/infographics/charts and graphs, captions, etc. can hold someone’s attention and keep them engaged and on the page for a while. Not always ideal for the content but just putting it out there that long doesn’t mean boring if it’s structured for it

 

[Jason]

I'm not lazy, but I'm not into SEO and so that saves the headache, well, not really. I want to create that stuff, but not in a forced way.

 

[Arantor]

I'd venture that short/one-line posts are part of the problem with Google treating forums as hot garbage for SEO purposes.

It's certainly been the case for a while that too short is definitely not enough for SEO purposes (though it's certainly not unheard of to spread a single article across several pages for the purposes of jamming ads in there), but I've yet to hear good advice for articles being overly long.

I'd suspect that 800-1000 words is good from a comfort-length reading perspective, any more than that needs to be split into multiple pages.

 

[Jason]

I'd venture that short/one-line posts are part of the problem with Google treating forums as hot garbage for SEO purposes.

It's certainly been the case for a while that too short is definitely not enough for SEO purposes (though it's certainly not unheard of to spread a single article across several pages for the purposes of jamming ads in there), but I've yet to hear good advice for articles being overly long.

I'd suspect that 800-1000 words is good from a comfort-length reading perspective, any more than that needs to be split into multiple pages.

That's why you gotta give up on SEO when your into forums and just invest in other traffic.

 

[Arantor]

I wrote a post a decade ago called “Forum SEO is a myth”, and no one has sufficiently challenged the points I made in it. Nothing’s changed.

 

[Jason]

I wrote a post a decade ago called “Forum SEO is a myth”, and no one has sufficiently challenged the points I made in it. Nothing’s changed.

You're probably right.

 

[joelr]

I wrote a post a decade ago called “Forum SEO is a myth”, and no one has sufficiently challenged the points I made in it. Nothing’s changed.

What were your points?

 

[Arantor]

What were your points?

The short version:

1. You're trying to game the system, a system that you have limited insight into and regularly updated to not be gamed the same way.
2. SEO works best on carefully written content; users don't tend to write content that will just happen to be good for SEO, and they don't tend to like it if you modify their posts.
3. Sitemaps don't really help forums. The search engines are capable of finding your content and figuring out if you updated it.
4. Pretty URLs don't really make a huge difference for forum content.

Note, this was written for an audience that primarily only just had forums and weren't even trying to add articles or related content because 'a forum is enough' - 2010 was a very very different time! - and I'd probably frame it very differently now in 2023.

 

[Jason]

The short version:

1. You're trying to game the system, a system that you have limited insight into and regularly updated to not be gamed the same way.
2. SEO works best on carefully written content; users don't tend to write content that will just happen to be good for SEO, and they don't tend to like it if you modify their posts.
3. Sitemaps don't really help forums. The search engines are capable of finding your content and figuring out if you updated it.
4. Pretty URLs don't really make a huge difference for forum content.

Note, this was written for an audience that primarily only just had forums and weren't even trying to add articles or related content because 'a forum is enough' - 2010 was a very very different time! - and I'd probably frame it very differently now in 2023.

That pretty much sums it up. 👍

 

[joelr]

The short version:

1. You're trying to game the system, a system that you have limited insight into and regularly updated to not be gamed the same way.
2. SEO works best on carefully written content; users don't tend to write content that will just happen to be good for SEO, and they don't tend to like it if you modify their posts.
3. Sitemaps don't really help forums. The search engines are capable of finding your content and figuring out if you updated it.
4. Pretty URLs don't really make a huge difference for forum content.

Note, this was written for an audience that primarily only just had forums and weren't even trying to add articles or related content because 'a forum is enough' - 2010 was a very very different time! - and I'd probably frame it very differently now in 2023.

Agree with all of the points.

Google is very good at figuring out what Google wants.

The way that we still ask about forum SEO in these legacy forum admin sites is a sign of how far behind we are. We really ought to simply be focusing on offering solutions and success for our users who are real humans, and Google will figure out the rest.

 

[Jason]

Writing long blog posts for some SEO optimized site might not be as hard to do as one thinks, but such a site cannot have a forum, just one on a different domain linked to the site.