How Many Words Ideal In A Post

How Long Should Your Posts Be?

It depends but one very important factor is how the search engines will see your post ( and if seen as unique content ) and the big problem with most blogging platforms is the amount of other stuff on the page which all counts as words when the search engine goes to index your page.

It is thought most Search Engines are looking for between 30% and 60% of unique content on a page .

The graphic below shows that the total number of words on the page we used for testing Why Bother Posting ? for that post the search engine's words that could be read was 620 words of which 320 were for that specific post which works out at about just over 50% unique content for that post, so should be acceptable for the search engines to consider the page to be worthy to be fully indexed. Of course a further benefit is that in that post there are enough words for the search engine to find specific unique phrases to help with your hard work to be found.

The Yellow highlighted content is the same on every page ( because of the way Blogging Platforms Work )
The Pink Highlighted content is your unique writing for that post
The Grey highlighted content is created via Javascript so the search engine does not understand and therefore does not count the words

Just as a check I checked how many words this post is and it is close 310 unique words when you include the words included in the alt tag in the graphic which works out at about 50% so closer to the threshold of what is acceptable of unique words required to be fully indexed by the Search Engines and not penalized for duplicate content but should still be OK


Page showing Content with blogger duplicated content / words shown in yellow highlighting and original content for that post shown in pink highlighting

Now I realize that this leaves a very integral part of blogging out in the cold , adding graphics and Photos to your blogs and how that information is indexed and counted by Search Engines . I will attempt to discuss in a later post, and we have changed the layout to include 10 latest blog posts which are delivered via javascript so should not be counted as words