word count vs quality vs activity

byownonlboss

2.2K followers

Updated 7 years ago

Many worry about whether or not they should focus on either word count, quality or activity (engagement of your visitors through comments and replies).

Quality

I write all my articles (posts) for quality. Quality means things people want to know and in an understandable way for them to read.

Quality also means content that matters. Topics that people look for. So this part is than the SEO part of my posts. I look continuously for low-hanging-fruit-keywords. Kyle has some excellent tutorial on this.
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/building-...

Quality also means good looking - clean layout, understandable headings and sub headings, use of lists, images, enough white space etc.

Word Count

As for word count, I have set a minimum of 500 words per post for myself. Usually it ends up somewhere between 500 and 800 for the posts that I cannot find enough content for. (not including WA blogs, this one is 400+ words sofar)

Most posts however, I manage to generate 800-1500 words.

To give you an idea, Kyle has his famous How To Lose Belly Fat Today website. I checked out his review on that juicer.
http://howtolosebellyfattoday.com/vitamix-6300-rev...

That post has 881 words said MS Word to me (this is what I often use to check word count on siteFeedback system). Just a bit more than 800!! And apparently Kyle makes money with that site, right?

Which one did we forget? Activity! Exactly!

Kyle also has activity on his blog. A LOT! Google sees that as extra word count and active updates to the page. Comments also give you an extra chance to link relevant posts (internal links, sometimes maybe even quality external links) inside the post through comments.

With the comments included, that review has now about 3760 word count.

Every time a comment is added to your new and older pages, a sitemap update is performed and google/bing will crawl your site.

It will influence your ranking based upon the quality of the content (engagement with readers, quality answers, quality internal and external linking), the increased word count (relevancy, authority) and the activity (engagement).

Conclusion

There you go, now you know what counts and in which order. Word count isn't the most important. Quality is number one and activity follows after. Word count comes through activity. But let's aim for 500-800 words at least for a highly qualitative post.

As a last note: you can always update your posts to reflect new insights and changes and with that add more words, better design and more quality to your site.

Best of luck!

Steven