19 July 2009 5 Comments

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A question was debated by bloggers over the years, is about how long blog posts should be. When I first started with the3dtechnologies.com, the rule was the post should be between 250 and 500 words. But, for a complete answer, there are different ways of looking at it.

1. Reader Attention – It was demonstrated that the web reader has a short attention span when read a blog online. According to my experience average blog readers stay about 1.00 minut per blog (this data has also been showed from other blogs out there).

2. Number of Posts – Writing shorter posts can be useful to write more posts. Sites like Engadget generating an high number of short posts which are better to create readership with RSS and be ranked well in Search Engines.

3. SEO – Many experts in Search Engine Optimization have different opinions if create extremely short or extremely long web pages. Many of them think that post that have not a reasonable length, are not ranked well as pages. The general opinion seems to be that a page of at least 250 words are probably a reasonable length. Also, many advise keeping pages under 1000 words. Recently, I keep my the3dtechnologies post between 500 and 1000 word lenght.

4. Coverage of the Topic – In general, there is no need to write an article of 1000 word, just cover the topic and then stop. However, if write long posts are not the right strategy, also, are not a wise move write short post that don’t cover the topic, as well.

In general, there are pros and cons to writing a long post. I think that with a long post you may lose a few RSS subscribers who do not like long post, while  you can increase your CTR, because reader losing interest and clicking on an Adsense ad.