I have come across an interest fact being reported on an application called Web CEO. I use Web CEO to do analysis of a website for onsite optimisation amongst other things. It is a good tool - and although you can do everything it does manually it simply speeds everything up. The interesting fact is that according to Web CEO top ranked websites usually have a word count of no more than 1,320 words and generally no less than 113 words.

With this sort of certainty I thought it appropriate that I do some greater research and I found a few more similar stats. Voila Fair says that your content should be between 300 and 600 words; but the most interesting one I found was a company called Internet Marketing Solution gives a very accurate breakdown by Search Engine:

• Google US between 521 and 715
• Yahoo US between 559 and 962
• MSN US between 506 and 711
• Google Oz between 637 and 792
• Yahoo Oz between 617 and 1,175
• MSN Oz between 448 and 601

So I guess the answer is somewhere between 500 and 700 words per page should see you in the right area.

It is important to add to this that while word count is an interesting consideration, it is your keywords that count and in this regard keyword density should be evaluated. That is, your selected keyword phrases should appear in your page content between 3 and 6% and as a percentage of your overall page construction including HTML code as about 4.5%. Your keyword density (the number of times your keywords appear relative to content) should rise to as much as 7% on internal pages, which are obviously optimised with greater specificity for your keywords to match content.

So, there we have some interesting tips based on word count. An few important provisos, and I stress again IMPORTANT, first don’t specifically right your content for search engines - search engines don’t book bed nights or go on tours, people do. Write your content with the purpose of attracting the right customers and converting them to sales (keeping in mind these great little helpers - also see my earlier posts regarding The Art of Writing Web Content). Secondly, on-site optimisation (which includes amongst many other factors the number of times your keywords appear, how many are bold, how many make up anchor text links etc) is only a small part of Search Engine Optimistation and Internet marketing - while it is important, there is so much more to the whole process. You can get a bit of a better feel for it in my February article which introduced a few more aspects of SEO.

Tags: SEO

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 9:11 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.