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What is the optimal length of a post in a blog? From 2005 to 2008, before Lu Songsong’s blog became independent, my articles were less than 100 words or even shorter; in 2009, my articles were about 500-800 words; as the blog developed, there were more and more words. In 2010, My blog posts are often around 2,000 words, and then I feel more and more that the blog posts are too long and too few people can read them completely. Many bloggers have been debating this issue for a long time. We need to consider a series of factors when deciding the length of an article.
1: Reader’s attention span
I don’t know who has done research to prove that the average user can only concentrate for a short period of time when reading content online, less than 2 minutes on average. This means you only have one and a half minutes to communicate with your readers. Therefore, the editors of many portal websites will deliberately limit the length of the content to a range that can be read at a few glances.
2: SEO
The general view among SEO optimization experts is that web pages that are too short or too long will rank behind web pages of moderate length. Of course, no one knows what the ideal number of words for an article in Google and Baidu is, but it is generally believed that no less than 250 words is more reasonable. Correspondingly, many people also believe that the number of words on a page should not exceed 1,000. This is just a range, don't ignore the user's feelings for the sake of search engines.
3: Number of articles
I saw a saying on the Internet that the shorter the article, the more articles can be written, and the more articles, the more readers can be accumulated through search engines, and many blogs or top customer websites provide short information. One or two sentences sums up what the news is about. For example, on Qike News, each article does not exceed 500 words, which is even shorter than Weibo and can be turned into a press release.
4: Topic and Genre
Usually the type of article you write determines its length. For example, review articles are usually very long; news articles are written by many people, so they should be shorter; for example, I often write technical articles, Therefore, the hierarchical structure must be clear, and the number of words should be controlled and controlled.
5: Comprehensively elaborate on the topic of the article
In the previous article "How to write a good review article", I made a point: writing an article is like writing an essay in elementary school. It needs to be written in the "total-point-total" routine. The purpose is to comprehensively explain the topic and then stop there. . It is never wise to just try to make up the word count, but the article is too short and cannot be comprehensive.
Okay, that’s it. In short, articles that are too long or too short are not good. Just try to ensure that users can read the article within 2 minutes. You can also write long articles and short articles interspersed with each other. The long articles are for readers to chew, and the short articles are for readers to think about.
For original articles, please indicate that they were reprinted from Lu Songsong’s blog
Thanks to Lu Songsong for his contribution