So when you are using this method you might think to yourself at some point:
“Hey wait a second…..I am making money from lots of long tail traffic here. Why don’t I just write ultra long articles, throw links at them, and get tons of long tail traffic that way? Why not write epic long posts instead of making lots of posts?”
This is a bad idea.
I can say that definitively because I tested it extensively, and also because I have a ton of data to base observations on.
Essentially what I have found is this:
Google and the search engines in general do not seem to like anything over 2,500 words or so.
At the same time, Google seems to rank content as short as 400 to 600 words fairly well.
Now, keep in mind that these numbers might change in the future, and also that they might vary quite a bit based on niche.
For example, if you look at all of the “oil filter” articles out there, they might be a lot shorter in average length, than, say, articles about cancer research or something like that.
But ultimately, if you are making money from the search engine traffic that you receive, then you want to focus on 2 things:
1) A very high volume of articles on your website (shoot for 100, then shoot for 1,000).
2) A very high quality of article on your website.
The danger of course is in going for volume and then having the quality suffer. Never let this happen or you will regret it. Maintain high quality at all times. That said, you want to eventually have a thousand articles on your website. If you can publish three articles per day then this only takes a year. Daily publishing is king, so long as you maintain quality.
Now, if you can create some form of link bait that you are relatively sure will get tons of links, then by all means, do whatever it takes to create that resource. But what I am cautioning you about here is that, in order to build up lots of search engine traffic, what you want is lots of articles, not long articles.
So for example, a website that has 1,000 articles that are all 600 words long or so is going to perform better than a website that has 500 articles that are all twice as long. It is the same number of words, but the website that has more articles will perform better in the search engines.
The reason for this is because each separate article title has the power to pull in a long tail search phrase. You get a huge boost from the article title itself. If your post title is “how to earn money online from seo” then you stand a chance of actually ranking for that full phrase in the search engines. However, if you wanted to rank for a similar phrase like “how to make income on the internet from smart optimization” then that would need a separate article and its own post title. You would not likely rank for both phrases with the same article, because the search engines put so much weight on the article TITLE.
That is why you need LOTS and lots of articles on your website. Because each one becomes like a little mini-website that has its own separate stream of search engine traffic. Just making one really long article is not going to pull in the traffic of many smaller ones.
Given a high quality and good keyword targeted post titles, the many smaller articles will beat the big long article every time.
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