A question I get asked a lot is how much body copy do I need for SEO? In the early days I used to say from 250 to 500 words. Now I prefer a more custom approach that I learned from Bruce Clay.
It starts with understanding that different queries will call for different amounts of copy. A searcher performing an informational query “how to use an slr camera” wants more copy than someone performing a transactional query “cheap sony slr camera 398.”
Consequently, Google will try to match the results to searcher intent. So if you want your page to rank for a transactional query, make your page look like a product details page, and pare back the copy. If you want to rank for an informational query, bulk up the copy.
So how do you figure out how much copy you need? Figure out which pages are ranking for the keyword you’re targeting, then look at how much body copy they’re sporting. Clearly Google has decided this is roughly the amount of body copy a page targeting this query needs, so write your page to fit within those parameters.
This just a guide. If all the other pages have 1000 words but you only have 250-words worth of stuff to say about the topic, either re-evaluate the topic or leave it at 250. Don’t sacrifice user experience in the name of SEO.
At the same time, don’t let designers or other marketers tell you “no one wants to read that much copy.” Tell that to Wikipedia. People go online for information, generally in the form of words or pictures. Give people the information they want, no more, no less.
So, the amount of body copy on a page will depend on searcher intent, who’s ranking for the query you’re targeting, and how much you really have to say about the topic.
Cathy Reisenwitz is a Birmingham, Alabama-based SEO. She blogs at Birmingham SEO Blog.
2 months ago today Google Caffeine went live, it promised live indexing which would lead to fresher results, sadly between 25th July right up to now Google’s crawling seems to be at snail pace, for example before and just after caffeine any blog post I published took around 10 minutes to be cached and indexed.
The most recent pages/post published took just a little longer, up to 5 days to be indexed. Why would a search engine which promotes live indexing take 5 days to cache and index a blog post or page of content, when the site-map has been updated and submitted and Google has been pinged the URL? personally I think the servers are under strain with an unexpected amount of pages being published and a heck of allot of crawl errors slowing down the bot.
I make these assumptions because many people will be redeveloping their websites due to everyone wanting to use HTML5 , because of this many people will just redo the content, change the URL structure (maybe mess up 301′s along the way). Anyway that’s just what I think, if you have any opinions please post a comment 
P.S Im going to track how long this post takes to be indexed!
For a long time now the majority of SEO’s have been led to believe that Google Suggests is based on keyword search volume. Because of this many try to manipulate it to suggest the keywords they want and to be honest I’m really tired of these guys messing up the search volumes on keyword data.
Google has stated that Google Suggests is based on keyword popularity, this term can be easily read as search volume but in reality Google are not stupid, they don’t want people manipulating data easily so they use an algorithm for it. The algorithm itself is a ranking algorithm, possibly similar to that of the organic search algorithm.
Through testing I have seen that the algorithm uses 3 factors at least when ranking each keyword, these are Content, Anchor Text and Search Volume. Search Volume seems to play the smallest role within this algorithm with mentions of the keyword within content and anchor text playing a much larger role.
The problem with manipulating the data in Google Suggests this far on is that due to the mass volume of content on the web, adding more content with new keywords is not going to make too much difference on the money making keywords. Another reason why the method is so effective is because the long tail versions of keywords contain the short tail keywords so long tail shouldn’t outrank its partnering short tail keyword (some keywords have exceptions), which gives the illusion of search volume playing a key factor.
At the end of the day Google Suggests as mentioned above has got to the stage where the majority of it cannot be messed with so please stop ruining my search volumes (more than Google already does).
P.S If you have seen any additional ranking factors for Google Suggests please let me know.
