I’ve done a lot of reading on the long blog posts versus short blog posts issue over the past few years to better understand what would be the best option when developing my domains.. I thought it was one of the easiest things to change if I was doing it wrong — It’s not very hard to split a 2000 word post into a Part 1 and Part 2. Something that you’d think would have a relatively simple answer in turn ends up with quite a complicated one, with many well respected sources disagreeing with others.

One school of thought says you should write a blog post to be as long as it needs to be to get your point across. Considering that pagerank is quite important when it comes to SERPs rankings and the importance of getting quality incoming links in building that pagerank, it makes sense to suggest you should write the best possible article you can and if it ends up being short or long, so be it — however, is that the answer you get when someone says your posts should be as long as it needs to be. If I feel like slacking off tomorrow, can I use the cop out that my blog post is as long as it needs to be? The remainder of this post will go on to explain why what one person thinks the optimal length of a post should be won’t always match up with what others believe the optimal length of a post should be.

Short Blog Posts

A more recent school of thought places emphasis on the power of social media. Research on the behavior of users on websites such as Digg and StumbleUpon suggests that people don’t read the entire article before deciding whether it’s worthy of being dug or stumbled — matter of fact, users on social media sites often read only the title of the article before deciding what constitutes a good article — that’s one vote for why having a good title is important, in addition to it’s strong SEO weight. Knowing the fact that title tags are perhaps the most important SEO element, would one not be better off having more short blog posts (leading to more title tags)? Short blog posts also result in increased post frequency — frequent additions of new content are viewed positively by Google. The downside of short blog  posts is that there needs to be real content on the page to encourage people to link to the article — especially when it comes to authority websites. While the pagerank algorithm isn’t known, many SEO experts believe that each pagerank is approximately log scale 5.5. This means that getting a link from my blog (PR4) is worth around 166 times the link juice that a link from a PR1 website is worth and similarly, getting a link from my site is worth around 1/166th of what a link from a PR7 website would be worth (all other things held equal). Would you believe a link from a PR10 website is worth over 4.5 million PR1 links? It certainly won’t be easy (more like impossible) to get a PR10 website to dofollow link to you, however just to put things in perspective — a single PR10 link would automatically make your website a PR8. No wonder why people buy links!

Long Blog Posts

Long blog  posts are much more likely to be linked to — there’s a lot more content and hence, a better chance that someone will find something on your page interesting enough that they want to share it with other people. Because the blog post is so much longer, it’s also likely to have many keyphrases in it which will get you long tail searches. Using this blog as an example, blog posts tend to be quite long in contrast to other blogs — probably averaging 1500 words, whereas most blogs are probably somewhere around 300 words per blog post. Would you believe 65% of this blog’s search engine traffic this month (359/549 search engine referred visitors) was from keyphrases which only found my blog between 1 and 3 times? Out of those 549 search engine referred visitors, a whopping 315 different keyphrases were used to find this blog. One downside of long blog posts is that they take much longer to write and are hence difficult to consistently write on a daily basis. Long blog posts are unlikely to be produced in the same number as short blog posts and hence, result in less title tags and less chances for social media to work it’s magic. On most websites, visitors stay for under 2 minutes before going on to another website or doing something else — with blog posts as long as the ones I tend to write, it’s unlikely that someone could even finish reading the blog post in the average length of time visitors tend to stay, so writing long blog posts could result in visitors only hearing part of your message (you can of course use h1/h2 tags not only for the SEO benefits but also to guide users along their way to content they may be interested in).

Who are your blog’s visitors?

Another thing you may want to consider is who reads your blog. If I use the domain name industry as an example, there are already some fine blogs out there such as Domain Name Wire which sum up the day’s news and generally long before I would get around to doing it. Am I providing any value to my visitors by writing short blog posts that are already available elsewhere? In contrast, if I take that news article and expand on it with my thoughts and the thoughts of other people I’ve asked to share their opinion and I further complement that with research I’ve done or paid for, I can now provide value which wasn’t found elsewhere. My personal opinion on the matter is that blog posts sharing news should be short whereas posts sharing information should be longer. There’s only so much information about the latest UDRP that your average visitor is going to want to read if the UDRP doesn’t affect them or if your average visitor doesn’t even know what a UDRP is, whereas if you write an informative post on say “How to avoid UDRPs”, many domain name investors will probably want to know everything they can do to mitigate their risk. Do your readers want you to get straight to the point or do they want to know every last detail?

Link Juice and SERPs

Think about your blog’s pagerank and how having more posts is going to divide that pagerank up into each page being worth less than had you had fewer posts.  If I put a sitemap up (something I really need to get done) and it links to each my 180 posts, how much link juice would be flowing to each of those blog posts? If I had 90 blog posts instead of 180, each post would receive much more and if I had 360 posts, each would receive much less. Who am I competing against in the SERPs for search engine traffic on these blog posts? If I already hold the #1 spot for a particular keyphrase I had optimized my blog for, can I perhaps not afford to forego a bit of link juice assuming I will still be able to retain the #1 ranking)? Would I be better off with 1000 PR2 blog posts or 20 PR4 blog posts? Would the answer to that not depend on which keyphrases I’m targeting, where I currently rank in the SERPs, keyword competition on my targeted keyphrases, and expected search engine traffic to be received from ranking high in the SERPs for those targeted keyphrases? I wasn’t even aware of this myself but what I was reading today on SEO blogs is that Google has apparently changed the way nofollow is handled, so you can’t engage in pagerank sculpting by placing nofollow on pages you don’t want using your pagerank — now, any link be it dofollow or nofollow will use you pagerank, just that a nofollow link will give you (or the person you’re linking to) nothing in return. All of the sudden, it seems pretty stupid to be using nofollow (I better change that!).

Microblogging and Linkblogging: How Short is a Short Post?

Isn’t it incredible how something so simple as whether your blog posts should be short or long can turn into such a complicated question with so many angles to consider? And now just recently, we have to consider not only short and long blog posts but also microblogging — just another thing to throw in there to further complicate things. To those who’ve been living under a rock recently, microblogging and linkblogging take short blog posts to a whole new level — why bother writing a blog post at all and not just give the title and maybe one or two sentences? I doubt I would ever read a blog myself that consisted purely of 1-2 sentence posts, however they can be mixed up with longer posts here and there when there isn’t much to say about an issue. A 2 sentence rant on your hate of domain appraisals subsequently followed by you asking your readers what they think about the matter could very well prove interesting, as might a one sentence post such as “Click here to see a good discussion on the uselessness of domain appraisals” — there might not be much content to the post but there may be plenty of interesting content left by readers about their opinions on the matter. I know Jamie over at DotWeekly has started incorporating microblogging into his domain blogging regime. Microblogging over a platform such as Twitter will allow you to connect with many people who might never have otherwise found your blog through the traditional channels such as search engines or RSS readers. There a few websites out there that will take your blog post and condense it to fit it on microblogging platforms such as Twitter so that you can write a normal size blog post on your blog while still getting the main message or a good idea of what your blog post is about across to microblogging communities.

Post Length and Blog Readership

Shorter blog posts will probably lead to more readers but what do you want more blog readers for? If you want more readers so you can show potential advertisers that you have more readers to justify charging them a higher rate, that certainly seems to make sense. If you want to try and sell visitors an informational product (eg. ebook), you’re probably better off writing longer blog posts so that readers can see that you write quality material and that your informational product will likely be worth the price for them. One needs to consider conversions. How much is a visitor worth if he buys your product? If you’re trying to sell your readers a product, then you don’t care about the number of visitors but rather the number of conversions. How many blog readers can you convert into product buyers?

Perhaps you’re like me and haven’t yet gotten around to properly monetizing your blog — you’re just not sure what you want to do with it yet. Would you not prefer to have more loyal blog readers than the one-off blog reader who found what he was looking for and will never come back? This once again goes back to the question of what makes a first time blog reader a regular blog reader. If you have more blog posts, they may find more that interests them, however if you have longer, informative blog posts, your posts probably deliver more value which they haven’t found elsewhere. If I take this post as an example — there are plenty of blogs which have covered the short post versus long post blog debate over the years, however how many of them have written a 2800 word article about it? Most of them have a couple hundred words with more conjecture than fact. Most offer an incomplete, not elaborated upon answer along the lines of “Write your blog posts as long as it takes to deliver your message”. That’s great, but of what help is it to you in determining what’s best for your blog and your blog’s visitors? You probably googled up the short post versus long post issue because you weren’t sure of what message your blog should deliver. I could have written this exact same post and delivered the exact same message in half as many words by not elaborating on any of the main points. Would that have been better? For some, I’m sure it would have been. Others, once again, are looking for something more informative that they can’t find elsewhere. With so many bloggers already having covered the short post versus long post issue, of what value am I providing if I’m just one of the hundred others all providing an incomplete answer?

Blog Post Content

One thing I need to work on myself is making posts more scannable — If I provide an H1 tag every 500 words or so, it makes the post easier for visitors with little available time to scan through and decide whether the entire post is worth reading, not reading, or worth reading those 500 words between one H1 tag and the next one. The same goes for bolding or changing the colors on key points to make my longer posts more reader friendly. With the ever increasing popularity of microblogging and the overwhelming number of new blogs being created each day, I expect we’ll see short posts eventually fall out of favor, with people preferring either microblog posts or long posts. There’s only so much you can cover in a 300 word post and it usually doesn’t cover much more than you could have gotten from just reading the title and perhaps a 2-3 sentence summary.  I think I’ve summed up most of the main points to consider when determining what length your blog posts should be.  While suggesting that one’s blog posts should be as long as they need to be to get one’s point across is a little too simple, it doesn’t make sense to intentionally increase your word count for a blog post subject that can be explained in far fewer words.

As I often say on this blog, time is money. Are you providing your readers with value for their time? If not, cut your post’s length down to the point where you are. If you can provide 3000 words of value to your readers, then there’s nothing wrong with writing a 3000 word post. Place yourself in your reader’s shoes — would you read your own blog post (and be honest with yourself here)? Studies on post length suggest that shorter posts tend to contain more value per word — but is your reader a utilitarian obsessed with maximizing utility or someone who doesn’t necessarily want the most value on a per word basis but the most value overall? I could have certainly provided more value on a per word basis with this article had I made it 300 words instead of 2600, however would a reader then have to google the issue to find out what my blog post left out? To me, that’s unacceptable. If I cover an issue, I want to cover as many angles as I’m aware of — that doesn’t mean I’ll always cover every angle because I’m often not aware of every angle, but at the very least, I strive to cover what I know whenever I can and if I don’t know enough that I would be satisfied with the answers provided upon reading my own blog post, I’ll consult with someone who can clue me in to the rest or I’ll google the post topic myself to see what other spins I can put on the article and whether there were any main points I missed out on covering.

If you want to appeal to as many visitors as possible, there’s nothing wrong with writing posts of different lengths. Some of my posts are extremely long, whereas sometimes they’re only 500 words or so. Similarly, for a blog that routinely puts out 500 word posts, there’s nothing wrong with the occasional microblog post or 200 word post. Like I talked about in yesterday’s post, there’s a lot in common between domaining and domain development. If you start applying concepts you’ve learnt in domaining to domain development, I think you’ll see quickly grow. Everything really does come down to targeted traffic. Even if you’re selling advertising on a CPM basis, you’re not going to find your advertisers staying around long if your traffic is so untargeted it’s not converting into sales for them.

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