How many words should my blog posts be to rank well on?Google?

There are three easy answers to the question about how long your blogs ought to be to rank on Google. I can tell you a few tips of the trade to help your blog rank on Google, but you might not like it.

I like all my answers because they have variable levels of truth.

I will rank my answers from least true to most true, for my own entertainment.

Answer 1: Blogs ought to be 800–1000 words long

In order to rank well on the Google, your blogs ought to be in the range of eight hundred to one thousand words long. It’s a convenient length, because it also happens to be the length that tends to be the easiest sell for the human attention span in the current climate of Attention Economy, where five minutes is usually the length of time people are willing to gamble on something. It takes about five minutes to read eight hundred to a thousand words, or so the people say.

Degree of Truth: Just Shy of Freudian

Eight hundred to a thousand words long is the dogma, as of this writing, diagnosed by the SEO gurus this week. It used to be shorter. It may be longer in the future.

The reason this isn’t a perfect truth, only as true as Freud, is because it’s true right now, but it probably won’t be true later.

It’s still useful to know: write blogs in the range of eight hundred to a thousand words right now in order to rank on the Googlebot.

Answer 2: Longer is better

Google favors “heavier” websites. If your website has more pages and takes up more bytes of data, it will tend to rise higher in the quagmire of that the Swamp of Google has become. By a similar token, longer content, i.e., “heavier” content, i.e., content with more bytes of data, tends to simmer towards the top of the pond, like gas bubbles or family secrets.

While it isn’t necessarily a way of optimizing your blogs, a longer blog has more space in it for repeated keywords and phrases that might be Googled by your readers.

Side note: I’m not sure if I’ll ever stop being childishly pleased that “Google” sounds vaguely dirty.

Degree of Truth: Millennial Nietzschean

In the same way that the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche has found a new bed of fertility in the stylishly nihilistic mind of the Millennial generation, and therefore has a fresh coat of truth smeared over it like ultraviolet paint dumped over the people waiting in line to get into that one nightclub, the rule that “longer is better” will probably always be true, if the rules of Google stay the same, i.e., if Google continues to favor “heavier” websites and if having a good old google (snerk) continues working the way it’s working where more instances of your keywords repeated in your content will help your blogs rank. These aspects of Google have been the same for a long time, though, and they’re some of the few that sort of seem to work. I don’t seem them changing too fast.

Answer 3: Google it (snerk)

The thing is that SEO is an adaptable science, which is why there are a lot of professionals doing it. It isn’t at all impossible, but it is ever-changing, because it’s constantly reacting to itself. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a self-defeating science, because it’s based on competition. Every new technique that arrives comes to light in order to cope with the last successful technique. Anyone who gets a handle on the last technique is behind the curve and about to be swamped by everyone who gets a handle on the going technique, and whoever thinks they’ve mastered the latest technique is about to be overrun by the next generation of tech wizards. It’s an endless cycle of predation, and it shows no sign of ending any time soon.

If you’re reading this a few months or a year or so after it’s been published, it won’t be such a bad exercise for you, before writing your next blog, to get into Google and Google the phrase “How long should my blogs be for SEO?”

How many staffers’ll tell you to go somewhere else for your answers? You should see my jock strap.

(No, you shouldn’t. I won’t show you.)

Degree of Truth: Aristotelian

Unstylish, yes. Discouraging, certainly. But it has a reliability that gives one a sense of order and civility in the world. Or it does to me, sometimes.

So…how long should my blogs be?

It matters, but it doesn’t matter as much as a few other things.

Length is only on of the things to take into consideration when you’re having a Google (heh heh). Other things include basic human nature, because ultimately The Google is a tool that serves us, the human population. I know it often feels the other way around, and The Google feels like it’s some Latter Day God, dictating our lives. It does actually respond to human behavior, though, because human beings are its sustenance, so in the long run it does want to help us.

Since this is the case, there are several thoughts to bear in mind when you are writing your blogs. How long is one, but that’s because at the moment five minutes is the optimum attention span to aim for, because human beings have demonstrated that’s the amount of time they’re willing to gamble, so SEO gurus say to write things eight hundred to a thousand words long.

Other things to think about:

• The average length people gamble on things is five minutes, but if you grab them in the first ten seconds they tend to be willing to gamble more. Which means to make your first paragraph pertinent. Repeat the keywords of the subject you’re writing on inside your first paragraph and you’re more likely to hold their attention.
• Repeat your keywords throughout your blogs. Google’s algorithms are sort of written to mimic the behaviors of human beings. The Google is “reading” your blog posts and making “judgments” about pushing it higher in the rankings. It will skim your blogs, more or less, and if you’ve written something that demonstrates more pertinence to the subject you’re giving yourself a better chance of a better Google ranking. Google is like someone who just skims things and then suggests them to other people. So imagine if someone just skimmed your blog: if they saw a lot of sentences and words that have something to do with what you’re trying to find, they’re more likely to recommend this blog versus that other blog that doesn’t have a lot of keywords in it.

The Google is, more or less, a prosthetic extension of the human psyche, with the ulterior motive of making money by keeping you coming back. Think about that while you’re writing your next blog.