One of the biggest discussions online today revolves around content and SEO.  Many people wonder how much text on a given page is too much or too little, and if more optimized pages help your rankings.  This short blog post will hopefully answer those questions for you definitively.

In order to really take advantage of SEO, be it on-site or off-site, we must understand how search engines like Google work.  Google, yahoo, Bing and all the others are designed to do one thing.  That’s provide you the searcher with the best possible answer to your search query.

Many people say that your homepage should have as few words as possible because nobody is going to read a lot of content.  While there is some truth to this, it’s more accurate to say that people are going to skim whatever content you have and read only what they are interested in at the time.  Also, the truth is that websites with 2,000 or more words on the page are the ones that rank on the first page of Google searches.

So what does this mean?  It means that you should always focus on quality content.  Deliver information that is thorough, interesting and adequately addresses the topics for which it’s been optimized.  If you can do that in 300 words, great.  If it takes 3,000 words, that’s great too.  Just break up those big pages with headlines so your human reader can easily get the big picture at a glance.

As to whether it’s better to have a whole bunch of SEO pages to rank, well, that’s a bit iffy too.  Again, the point is to be relevant and useful.  If you just create a hundred pages of blah blah blah with a high keyword density, it really won’t help you very much.  Always keep two things in mind: quality content gets ranked and gets read by the person who visits your site.

It’s better to have a few good pages than a whole bunch of “optimized” pages that actually say little.