JIC Design Blog: SEO, Web Development and Technology

For years now SEO’s would tell writers and content creators to provide them with at least 250-300 words for each web page. But what does that number mean? Why 250 words? Well, after numerous years of experience, the broad SEO community had agreed that 250-300 was the magic number of words for ranking pages well in Google. This has been argued and will continue to be argued upon, but now Google has thrown a curve ball!

Over the last couple of years, scraper sites have abused this magic number and have placed well in Google. So the time has come for Google to combat this attack, and they have done so in a valid technique. Word count is a key indicator of how in-depth an article is and acts as a quality indicator.

Recently, hyper-focused content has been losing out to natural, rich writing, especially when trying to grab on to that long tail of search. The long tail whips searchers to websites with keywords the webmaster never thought to optimize.

Therefore, an optimal approach is to use in-depth writing coupled with enabled comments. Consumer reviews (if your site is so conducive) are even better. Enabling comments, or allowing visitors to post their opinions increases content and relevance with little effort on the webmaster’s part.