Minimum of words for article to rank

[Catfish]

What you guys consider to be a minimum of words in an article if you want it to rank (for long tail keywords that is).
I have had articles ranking for medium-competitive three- and four word combinations although the text was as short as 200 words. Makes you wonder whether for less competitive long-tail keywords, a 100-word article could rank?

[Prop]

Google.com was just redirecting me to google.co.th. I searched Google No Redirect, in google and got about 40 word text with the link I needed.

There's another domain that for a huge exact match was ranking #18 at one point with not a single word of text on the website. Now its a big site and not even sure it is in the top 10

[ak]

I reach for 750 words

[PokerCollege]

For long tail keywords I suggest 500+ words.

[mi100us]

I get 150 to 200 word posts to rank, but Im sure you would get more of them ranked with more words. I have heard 425 is a magic number, but 500 is a good suggestion.

[Prop]

145 imo
Seriously there is no magic number here. Personally I won't post an article on any of my sites less than 750 words, though most articles tend to run 1500 words minimum, and on occasion go 6,000+ words.

[Randy Ray]

It depends on how many keyword phrases you want to rank for. The more words you have a on a page, the more potential matches. If you pick completely non-competitive keyword phrases, you might be able to rank for a few of them with just a sentence or two on a page.

I used to target 500 words per page on every page, but I try to be a little more ambitious with each page now.

[Prop]

I have a parked page ranking #2 in Google for a gambling term and it got 94 visits last month and shows a PR2 in toolbar. Apparently it was once a site.

[Race Media]

work on 500 minimum pushing toward 1000

amazing how many 250 - 350 word ones there - so it stands to reason that a further few hundred on topic, logical words should appeal to googles "quality" algorithm

[pokeraussie]

I don't subscribe to the minimum word count theory. The article should be as long as you need it to be informative or to serve its purpose. Just make sure you have the onpage SEO for the site taken care of. Longer articles can work well for SEO because they have a tendency to attract more natural links and like RR suggested they can generate more long tail traffic, but it doesn't mean every article has to be a certain word length. At the end of the day it's not rocket science, its going to be pretty impossible for a 100 word article to attract many natural links.