How much content is needed?

[mi100us]

Content without backlinks won't do much. Im not talking about getting backlinks just to get your front page Page Rank, link our inner pages. If are using a WYSIWYG you might want to think about switching. My first ever site was on a WYSIWYG and it never got ranked, and had trouble getting indexed, I had very similiar problems as you. I scraped that site (not say you should scrape your site) and learned how to use wordpress and my content is indexed daily and ranks well for long tail keywords. I only post 150 to 200 word promotion updates. Not telling you you should not have longer articles just my experience, my longer article get indexed as well. I know it sounds simple and you may have heard it before but it rings true, "content, backlink,content,backlink,content" one without the other doesn't do much.
here are free tools I use to backlink all my posts. I wouldn't pay for a membership but the free tools good. Free Traffic System - Increase Targeted Website Traffic with Free Unlimited One Way Links IMAutomator also commentluv is a great as well. For submitting feeds I use http://feedshark.brainbliss.com/

[CasinoMack]

I think my reply was the most useful, but fell on deaf ears.

[pokergirl]

They said, a page length really should be between 400 and 600 words.

[Michael Martinez]

My site has been up and running since Nov. of 2010. I have read where it takes up to 6 months or so before Google will trust your site and its content.

What I have seen from a Googler is that it takes them about 6 months to size up your site, so after that point they lift whatever restrictions new sites are placed under -- the so-called Sandbox Effect. That doesn't necessarily mean they trust your site so much as they give it greater license to screw up.

Trust and authority are built up gradually by the way a site behaves through its content and its backlink profile. There may be some pivotal points in the process but it's supposed to be gradual and continual.

[Strider1973]

I would not measure content in kb, but content in number of pages published and in number of words in each article.
There are sites that do well with 200 word articles, and other sites do well with 2k+ word articles (see viperchill as an example).
Personally, I prefer longer articles. How can anyone call a 500 word article a "poker strategy article" for example? Or would you buystrategy book where each chapter only contains 500 words?

Anyway, it just takes time. My rule of thumb is that each article of 500+ words should bring 2 visitors per day. So maybe you should hunt for a few more links and be patient. There are affiliate marketers who wrote a site two years ago and never added fresh content to it, and still make a good living from it. They just keep adding a few links.

[bopo1959]

What I have seen from a Googler is that it takes them about 6 months to size up your site, so after that point they lift whatever restrictions new sites are placed under -- the so-called Sandbox Effect. That doesn't necessarily mean they trust your site so much as they give it greater license to screw up.

Trust and authority are built up gradually by the way a site behaves through its content and its backlink profile. There may be some pivotal points in the process but it's supposed to be gradual and continual.

What would be considered a screw up?

[bopo1959]

I would not measure content in kb, but content in number of pages published and in number of words in each article.
There are sites that do well with 200 word articles, and other sites do well with 2k+ word articles (see viperchill as an example).
Personally, I prefer longer articles. How can anyone call a 500 word article a "poker strategy article" for example? Or would you buystrategy book where each chapter only contains 500 words?

Anyway, it just takes time. My rule of thumb is that each article of 500+ words should bring 2 visitors per day. So maybe you should hunt for a few more links and be patient. There are affiliate marketers who wrote a site two years ago and never added fresh content to it, and still make a good living from it. They just keep adding a few links.

So 70 pages each containing 1 article of avg size say 400-500 words, would be better than 10 pages each with 7 articles containing a total of 3000+ words?

Can the Search engines find more than one article per page, or just the 1st one it reads?

So a five part tournament strategy article is better on 5 pages? 1 page for "Before you start", 1 for "early rounds", 1 for "mid rounds", 1 for "bubble play", 1 for "late rounds", and 1 for "final table"? Or is something like this better as one long article?

I have them all on one page , I thought this would be easier for the readers to follow!

Is the chance of each of the 70 pages being indexed, what gives you a better chance of ranking higher?

[pokerprop]

Consider how the internet works. If you're 3,000 word article is the best information on tournament strategy they've read, they might bookmark, pass it to a friend, maybe even click like for facebook at bottom if there is a link showing others have done the same, maybe they link to it or reference it on a blog etc. What happens when a blogger needs to quote content on the 3rd page and links to that?

If your target is tournament strategy and this is what you got, then I think putting it all on the same page is fine.

Again, my responses were all chopped up here due to PAL error with old version, but seriously: the best advice I can give is during the early days do "basic" SEO only.. and then focus on OTHER ways to get traffic. I have a few sites still pulling in money that haven't been touched in over 5-years. One of them made a few grand last month from "new business".

For the specific example I just mentioned I started with a $250 monthly marketing budget for it, after a few months when profits came in I upped that to $500 and ran it for about 1.5 years doing that. The advertising I was doing was not at all SEO based. On top of this marketing my site had value and by word of mouth people starting finding it and telling others about it. It reached PR5 without ever intentionally seeding a link on the net. No link exchanges, no link buys, etc. I did link to it myself a few times here and there, but this was always with the intent of promoting it.

In time this site was ranking for all types of poker room names, bonus code terms etc, and Google was pushing me 10,000 extra visitors per month where like 5,000 of them were from big money terms. I put the $500 extra back in my pocket around the time the site started making 20x that from google traffic, and then started tweaking the SEO (I had plenty to work with).

Another example: One of my friends built a site that was pulling 1.5 million monthly page views (about 400,000 unique) without ever one time gaming google or being at all SEO conscious.

Guess what happened from here . When we got together and wanted to target a term it was so easy. Register a domain name that included the keywords we want to target - make it the absolute most authoritative site on that topic and then link to it from our established sites that for many years never gamed google or cheated to get rankings. It was like magic. These sites were not spam either as wikipedia became one of my top referrals before myself or any of my partners ever edited a wikipage. These days I do a lot of wiki edits. 90% of them just for the hell of it where I have no benefit at all to do it, about 10% of the time updating things one of my sites has covered.

Now this isn't advice against doing all the other things mentioned. If you can afford it by all means links, links, links etc should that be your preference. However, regardless of what method you use (natural) or (gaming for google) the answer to almost every question about content should be "what's best for the user". Doing things that way will give you the most rankings, highest earnings, and largest exit value over the long run, in most all cases.

[Strider1973]

So 70 pages each containing 1 article of avg size say 400-500 words, would be better than 10 pages each with 7 articles containing a total of 3000+ words?

Interesting answer from Pokerprop!

I don't know which strategy will lead to more visitors, having 10 pages with 1500 words each or having 30 pages with 500 words each. Would be interesting to know if anyone has examined this in greater details. My gut feeling is that longer articles get more visitors/100 words, just because they will enable more long term searches. On the other hand, keyword density for specific KWs might be lower, making an article rank lower... So TBH I just don't know the answer to your question.

[parttimepoker]

If you write really intriguing, controversial stuff that people want to pass around, you could get by with an article a week, or even one every two weeks. If you write generic stuff that has been written a hundred times already (play tight early!), then you could crank out a hundred articles a week and it wouldn't really matter.

My point is that quality is the important metric, not quantity.

I semi-agree with Prop's answer re: long content. I think it's better to put it all on one page, but I think you also have to be creative about how you format longer content so that readers don't just see a wall of text and quit after a couple of paragraphs.