When is a post too much? When should the post be cut down before it gets boring? If you are worried you could be boring your readers, read on!

There is a fine balance between too much and too little when you are blogging. Too much and your readers get bored, too little and the search engines will ignore you. Accepting that less than 200 words is certainly never enough to interest the search engines, just how much should you write per blog post?

Beware the attention span
Why is a long post too much? Well people can have a short attention span, especially when reading things on the internet. And if your post has just ran to 1000 words of highly detailed text, then they are unlikely to finish reading it. Is this a problem? Of course – if they got bored before they finished it they are unlikely to go on to read another post and almost certainly not going to come back again in the future. By providing too much, you have put them off as repeat visitors for life.

Personally, I find that posts in the order of 400 – 500 words work quite well in search engine terms. Much less than 400 and you cannot entice the search engines in to your pages.

If it is too big, split it
This actually gives us a very good guide. If your post gets to the 800 – 900 word mark, then it can easily be split into two equal halves of 400 – 450 words each. Each is then big enough to entice the search engines in to take an interest, whilst small enough to give the reader a break at the end and you have the advantage of being able to send them to a second page to read more information.

Style, not just size
Of course, a lot also depends on your writing style and the content of your post. It is not just how many words there are in the post, but also how it is presented. As a web designer I am frequently given blocks of text from new website owners that run to hundreds of words per paragraph. This can be very difficult to read.

So as well as keeping the blog post to a reasonable reading limit, you should make certain that the layout makes it easy to read. Shorter paragraphs are easier to handle on the page and if you can, add a few titles as you go to introduce different aspects of the post. It tells your reader what is coming up next and makes them easier to handle.

And the answer is…
So, how much is too much? Well posts in the order of 800 words can safely be split into 2 posts, maybe even slightly shorter by the time you add a conclusion to the first half and an introduction / refresh in the second post. But also keep an eye on that layout to make it easy to read and more interesting.

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