Using the Right Length to Optimize Your Posts

You should already know that content marketing is the element that provides crucial traction for a website. Without content marketing, it becomes almost impossible to tempt users to your webpage, so that conversion might happen.

However, creating the content alone is not enough – you also have to ensure that your posts are optimized. You’ve done the hard work in creating original, engaging text, now you need it to be recognized and engaged with by your audience. With that in mind, what is the right length of a post? The answer varies widely according to the platform that you’re posting on. However, for a general guide:

• Tweets that are shorter than 100 characters have a 17% higher engagement rate according to studies by BuddyMedia.
• On Facebook, posts that contain forty characters have an 86% higher engagement rate than posts with higher character counts.
• For Google+ 60 characters is the ideal length. If your headline cannot be represented within a single line, you’ll need to tempt readers in with a gripping first sentence.
• Twitter hashtags should be no more than six characters long. Make sure that you don’t use spaces or start with numbers, and avoid slang terms.
• The best domain names are short and easy to remember. Nobody wants to search for a website that they struggle to spell or recall. It’s also a good idea to choose a .com extension if possible, and avoid hyphens.
• Make sure that your titles never go over sixty characters, or you’ll end up getting a shortened tag, followed by an ellipsis.

Blogging Lengths

Generally, most bloggers follow the unspoken rule that content should be at least three hundred words long or more. If you are one of the many people who blog through WordPress and uses the SEO plugin by Yoast, you will find that this minimum has actually been built into the algorithm. If you don’t hit 300 words using the Yoast plugin, you will not get a good score for your post.

The truth about blogging, however, is that the length of your content doesn’t really matter as long as you get valuable information out there. Some people recommend that you aim for approximately 1500 words every post, and some have suggested that this number is far too high, especially as it prompts many writers to pad their content out with meaningless text. Whether your blog is three hundred words long, or three thousand, there is nothing more frustrating to a user than reading through all of those words to discover there is nothing more than superficial advice or rehashed information.

Use Shorter Paragraphs

Writing a guest post, blog post or article should be thought of as offering your readers a delicious meal. As great and nutritious as it might be as a whole, they need to eat it in bite-sized portions. Use short paragraphs and subheadings to ensure that your readers can scan through pages quickly and focus on the elements that interest them if they are not interested in one particular area of your post. It’s all right for your reader to jump straight into dessert, as long as they enjoy something that you’re offering them.

Remember Your Headline

Remember, when it comes to your initial headline, Google imposes a strict limit of sixty characters, but it’s typically a good idea to go slightly beneath this – just to be safe. Shorter titles are easier for searchers to scan when they’re reading through the results of their search, and they will not be truncated by Google and replaced with ellipses.

A good tip with most titles is to ask questions, use numbers and promise some sort of benefit for the time that your reader takes to consume the information you’re giving them. Don’t forget though, robots read your headlines too, and an H1 tag is an essential part of organizing good SEO. Being creative is fine, just try not to go too over the top, especially if your content is for Business to Business. Stick to a headline that delivers information as to what the reader can expect from your post.