Does size matter?

[ashfield1984]

Hey fellas

I started my poker site last week and have a budget which allows me to either get 5 x 250-300 word articles a week or 2/3 500 word articles a week.

Which would help me seo wise? I have knupt writing the articles. Brilliant service by the way!!

Another thing I wanted to ask. I bought the domain, have it set up on wordpress with a design and now have articles posted. I just wanted to know what I should be doing to the posts? I have all in one seo pack. But what I mean is should I be linking to other posts on my site? How do I get google and other search engines to notice my posts?

Thanks guys.







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[Mackan]

If 250-300 words is enough to cover the topic then I would go with that. If you would need 2000+ words to cover your topic I would go with that. It all depends on what you are writing about.

[JohnH]

Yes, what mackan is saying is that size does not matter, it's how you use it! I personally would go with the longer articles, but only If necessary and not just to have longer articles.

[pokerprop]

You're probably going to want to have a mix. Word count shouldn't be much of a consideration when developing a website, but of course it is because of your budget and that these articles are being sold per word.

If forced into that thinking as you are, then going with 500 word articles is probably best. What I'd suggest doing though is in time spending some of any excess money you have beefing up the content to cover those topics better. Bullet lists, headers, good navigation etc (all hard in 200 words) Generally speaking, reading don't want to read 5,000 word articles. However a well written 800 word article no one think a thing at all about reading or skimming it most of the time. In times where it is a really interesting topic, 1500 words, 3000 words all acceptable.

I'd avoid doing 250 word articles MOST of the time. I however same deal have a small budget for one site I'm doing right now because not ready to commit a lot to it. After discussing it with the writer we had 6,600 words of text one topic and decide it was just better to break the bulk of it into twenty 200-250 word articles via a more details link inside a our stats table. This was better for navigation purposes and later could be for SEO. A lot more information exists on those topics and I could include a lot of additional content now (but don't want to create 20,000 more words for this site yet *later I probably will*)

So the point, I wouldn't avoid when it makes sense. however I'd strive to have thicker more informative content and generally speaking that's hard to do in a couple hundred words. Readers enjoying your content, clicking around, telling others about it, other webmasters linking to it, people social bookmarking or sharing it some other way, +1 ing, or whatever is all good stuff for SEO. In end for plans decide which is best to help you accomplish that.

[ashfield1984]

Ok thanks guys.

It's mainly poker news that's being posted on the site at the moment. But I'm guessing when/if I decide to have articles on strategy or reviews then 250 won't cut it because it seems to short to go into details.

It's one big learning curve

Thanks again.




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[leporello]

An article is as long as it is. I would never try to condense something like US poker sites or betting on NFL into X number of words. Make headings and subheadings, then fill them in with whatever comes out naturally. If that comes to 200 or 2000 words, then so be it. Some areas of gambling are so complex that trying to squeeze it into 500 words just doesn't do the article justice.

I hate article writers who try to fit an exact number of words on a page. Recently I decided to stop using an excellent writer as I found he was just starting to barely make it through the minimum word barrier without adding any value to the articles.

If you can add value and make an excellent user friendly article that correlates with exactly what searcher intent is and answer their questions exactly, then by all means do it. But if you're targeting various broad terms where searcher intent isn't so clear, then you should be going out of your way to make sure everyone is accommodated for.

[Michael Martinez]

Some great comments here but if you want as close to a "definitive" statement as you can get, you may want to look at a comment by Googler Susan Moskwa in this Google Webmaster Help discussion where she says:

...I have never ever seen a site where everything was great and it would have ranked well except its articles were only 200 words long. That's just... not the way the algorithm looks at stuff. If your site isn't ranking well, the cause must be elsewhere.

[OMGCAPSLOCK]

First of all, get Yoast's WordPress SEO - it's a million times better than All-in-one SEO and comes with sitemap generators and robots management.

I would refrain from getting articles written until you have looked at what areas of the market are being searched. Use Google's Keyword Tool (Google it, can't post links) for that and then have your article titles written around the most searched subjects. Also consider mapping out your website so that you use a hierarchical structure - competitive keyword topics being linked to from the navigation and lower comp keyword topics being linked to from other internal pages. Use bubbl.us (free) to map it out.

Some common/unnecessary mistakes to avoid:

1. Not planning your content - following Google's recent updates, content is now the most important aspect to your website - take care over your content; plan and review it heavily.
2. Not planning your SEO - make sure you know what's being searched for - but also decide if this search traffic adds any value to what you're trying to achieve.
3. Starting other projects - everyone falls prey to this at some point, keep your head down with this one project and don't even think about anything else until it brings in its first $. Then consider replicating, or expanding on, the current model.

Good luck!

[ashfield1984]

Thanks for the feedback fellas. I really appreciate it.


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