How long should an article be? It’s a simple enough question, but often depending upon who you ask, you’ll get a different answer. Why is this? The reason is because an article should be exactly as long as it needs to be. The real question is not how long an article should be, but what you want it for. Once you know that, then the length becomes either wholly irrelevant, or reasonably self evident. Let me explain a little further.

If you’re writing an article as content for your website, or as a service to deliver useful information to be people, or as part of a newsletter distributing information to subscribers, then your article needs to be exactly long enough for you to make your point. Clearly providing an article not long to explain yourself is of little value, and waffling on for ages after you’ve made your point is a waste of people’s time. Write an article, make your point, stop.

However, what many people ask is how long an SEO article should be. My initial answer is simply that it should be the same length as it takes to make your point. Why should SEO articles be any different? If you’re covering a complex subject then stopping at 400 words is unlikely to enable you to explain the topic adequately.

Similarly writing 1,000 words on a fairly easy to understand point is likely to put people off reading your articles in future – that’s if anyone actually made it to the end of your first article to find out who the author was.

But what we’re really talking about here is how much content is best to give the search engines a fighting chance of picking up on your article and considering it relevant enough to the topic to list it prominently in the search results pages.

One of the most important things to consider when writing high quality SEO articles and web content is to ensure that your vocabulary is as broadly relevant to the subject as possible, as it is the subject specific vocabulary which is going to help the search engines apply their Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) process to determine the context and likely relevance of the content.

Therefore if you write a 1,000 piece but use very little subject relevant language you may find that it has less impact and success than a 500 word article which packs a good deal of contextually relevant vocabulary into every paragraph.

No, I’m not talking about keywords – just subject relevant vocabulary which any good writer would use when covering a topic. For example, read this article again carefully and see if you can pick out just how many words relate to writing, articles, web content development, search engines and online business marketing.

Very few of them are repeated much, but they’re all there, and this article is only a little over 500 words. 500-700 is the sweet spot, but a word count alone is never enough. Make sure you use a broad and highly relevant vocabulary, and you’ll have a perfect recipe.