How Long Should Articles Be?

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How Long Should Articles Be?

Posted on August 5th, 2009 in Online Writing by Redburn

Full books in one page or just one sentence? Something between that. Keep reading to find out what should really be.

How long your articles should be is not an exact science. There are many websites that are successful with tiny articles while others are super successful with huge articles. An example of small articles is Life Hacker and an example of big articles is Problogger.net or StevePavlina.com. I believe that is not the size of the article that counts but the amount of value you give in that article. Some articles can be very long with little or no value to the user, much like a random generated text, while other say everything you need to hear in just a sentence or two.

Search engines prefer medium sizes articles. If you write a very short article it will not have enough keywords in both quantity and diversity to score, but on the other hand if you write too much in the same page you risk having an article with double meaning killing your ranks for some subjects because one article for a search engine can have only one subject. This is why you never see a one page only website, because if quantity was so much important that page would be on the top forever for all keywords.

How long should the article be? Somewhere between 2000 and 3000 characters. More than that is too much, less than that might be too little for the user and the search engine.

Use a tool that can count how big your article is such as Accurate Word Counter.

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6 Responses to “How Long Should Articles Be?”

Southgate
August 5th, 2009 at 12:16 pm

Nice.You could have elaborated a little more.Thanks for sharing.
Uma Shankari
August 5th, 2009 at 2:40 pm

Good insight.
Gail Gunter
August 5th, 2009 at 7:41 pm

Thanks for taking the time to check it out. I have wondered where the balance would be in the length of an article or story.
fishfry aka Elizabeth Figueroa
August 5th, 2009 at 8:39 pm

You seem to write a lot about writing, I guess you must be getting near your million dollar mark by now
As always great thoughts and comments.
Awesome
R J Evans
August 6th, 2009 at 8:43 am

Personally, when I write an online article I write till I am finished!

With Triond, you will pretty much get past the ads after 300 words – especially if you include images – and that is what they want. However, I find the ideal length – to get something said that is worthwhile reading – is between 700 and 1000 words…

Just thought I would stick my oar in!
Susan Keeping
August 9th, 2009 at 6:09 am

I’m always worried about the length of my articles. One site I write for suggests articles between 400 and 500. However, others suggest around 1,000. Most of my articles do tend to be closer to 400 than 1,000. Other like to write long articles like 2,000 words but I find I usually get bored with articles that long unless they are amazingly written.