On-Site SEO, how much content is needed?

[Guyver001]

I am thinking about starting from scratch on a niche website. Most of the basics I am familiar with such as H1 tags, keywords, LSI keywords, and internal/external backlinking for SEO. However, I am still fuzzy about the amount of content I should be adding to the site. On average, about how many unique articles should I have published on my site, such as a WP blog, that the search engines will rank good for?

 

[johandr]

I'd say atleast 5-10 500 word articles on your micro niche sites, depending on the competition of the keyword.

 

[hekasis]

Look at how many articles your competition has got related to your keyword and do a few more.

E.g. You want to rank for "pink girly cars" and your number 1 competitor has five articles about pink girly cars then you write six and link them all internally to your main article you want to rank. And don't forget to build some backlinks to all your articles.

This is what I am doing and I see some good results.

This also good to do when you do your research. If all the top websites have 1000s of articles related to your keyword you might want to find another keyword if you want easy rankings.

Hope this helps.

 

[Guyver001]

Look at how many articles your competition has got related to your keyword and do a few more.

E.g. You want to rank for "pink girly cars" and your number 1 competitor has five articles about pink girly cars then you write six and link them all internally to your main article you want to rank. And don't forget to build some backlinks to all your articles.

This is what I am doing and I see some good results.

This also good to do when you do your research. If all the top websites have 1000s of articles related to your keyword you might want to find another keyword if you want easy rankings.

Hope this helps.

It does help, thanks, and it makes perfect sense. Do you think there should be an off-site backlink to each article for diversity? I used to link only to the main URL in previous sites, so I'm not sure if google sees that as bad.

 

[james406]

 

[ber789]

More content means more opportunity for long tail so add as much as you can and set a schedule to add content on a regular basis for the freshness algo.

 

[hekasis]

Sorry for the late reply. I backlink all my articles evenly. It is also a good idea to target some longtailed keywords with your articles then you can get some extra traffic to your site very easily.

 

[dirkg]

The number one site for ALL the keywords I use for my business has no content. It has a 5 second flash video, then an entire screen of flash graphic with 3 links that change the flash graphic and make a VROOOOMMM noise.
Its a pr3 and im a pr2. I have more citations and almost as many backlinks. I still fall below sites with no citations and only no backlinks. Im still on page one though. None of the services here have been able to move me up.

 

[TheViceroy]

It really depends on a number of factors. I have a website that only has 3 pages and its ranking first for a 460,000 exact match keyword.

 

[zebrahat]

A way to help ensure you have better odds of ranking for the kws with bigger exact searches is to simply load up on diverse backlinks. 200 backlinks should be enough to help a mini site, while 1000 might be needed to help out a site built on a 50,000+ search term. A given site may not need that many links, but planning it that way can make ranking success more predicable.

 

[dunken]

According to the Google's Latest Penguin update - amount does not matter; quality matters.

 

[Kimi]

This usually depends on your competitiors. You have to offer more value and content than your competitiors.

 

[Guyver001]

A way to help ensure you have better odds of ranking for the kws with bigger exact searches is to simply load up on diverse backlinks. 200 backlinks should be enough to help a mini site, while 1000 might be needed to help out a site built on a 50,000+ search term. A given site may not need that many links, but planning it that way can make ranking success more predicable.

Good tip for the backlinking guideline, and I will implement it when I create the site. However, I need to know more about content for On-site seo. As others have said, penguin cares more for quality over quantity. To me, a computer program can't determine if an article is a good read or not. So it only determines it by seeing the time a user spends on the site. If a site has bad articles, then people will leave the site faster. However, if someone stays longer to read good stuff, then penguin sees it and ranks higher. I'm thinking of outsourcing to odesk for a professional author with good grammar and writing skills to write most of my material since I don't have the time to do it all myself. One other person in a different thread talked about his seo strategy when he worked for a team in a company that made $1 million in the first year of doing the seo. Basically, they launched the blog site with 10-20 articles to start, then added 5 fresh articles per week for the first 1-2 months to give the search engines something to chew on. Then they toned it down to 2-3 articles per week, but he claims the strategy worked well for them. Do you agree with this strategy? Do you have any other suggestions?

 

[Griller]

Its not so much about quantity than it is quality.

But for sure, a couple 500-1000 word articles would be a great starting point, you could probably even get away with 1 really long article if you break it down with headers.

I am thinking about starting from scratch on a niche website. Most of the basics I am familiar with such as H1 tags, keywords, LSI keywords, and internal/external backlinking for SEO. However, I am still fuzzy about the amount of content I should be adding to the site. On average, about how many unique articles should I have published on my site, such as a WP blog, that the search engines will rank good for?

 

[dragonrage01]

According to the Google's Latest Penguin update - amount does not matter; quality matters.

If you believe everything google tells you then you might be in the wrong business.

 

[zebrahat]

Good tip for the backlinking guideline, and I will implement it when I create the site. However, I need to know more about content for On-site seo. As others have said, penguin cares more for quality over quantity. To me, a computer program can't determine if an article is a good read or not. So it only determines it by seeing the time a user spends on the site. If a site has bad articles, then people will leave the site faster. However, if someone stays longer to read good stuff, then penguin sees it and ranks higher. I'm thinking of outsourcing to odesk for a professional author with good grammar and writing skills to write most of my material since I don't have the time to do it all myself. One other person in a different thread talked about his seo strategy when he worked for a team in a company that made $1 million in the first year of doing the seo. Basically, they launched the blog site with 10-20 articles to start, then added 5 fresh articles per week for the first 1-2 months to give the search engines something to chew on. Then they toned it down to 2-3 articles per week, but he claims the strategy worked well for them. Do you agree with this strategy? Do you have any other suggestions?

That's useful if you are going to concentrate on just a couple of sites, but if you have a farm of dozens of MNS, it's clearly unworkable. You could economize and write 10-12 articles, then rewrite each one twice. With 30-36 unique articles to work from, you could post 5 -10 right away, then drip the rest in at 2-3 per week until you run out. I prefer the set it and forget approach, especially if you complement SEO with other passive traffic strategies.