Truth of the matter, I have suffered with bad search engine optimization around 5 years ago. The main reason for this was the fact that I was relatively new to how the online industry works, how search engines such as Google works and so on. Therefore, it took a lot of mistakes to realize what made an article get ranked high on search engines and what didn’t.

This brings me onto the main reason for this article. There are two ways we can generally learn something. The first way involves doing something, making a mistake (because something bad happened) and learning from that mistake. The other way is to use the power of communication to understand what to do before the mistake happens. With this in mind, here are two essential SEO tips for website owners and bloggers to use when they post online so that others out there do not make the same mistakes I once made.

#1 Long Articles Have Good SEO

The first tip to point out is that there is a general correlation that the longer your articles are, the better it is for search engine ranking. This is because:

• Search engines will have more content to process. Therefore, they can get a better idea about what your article is about to help them rank it better.
• Longer articles tend to go into more detail about a certain topic. Therefore, it could be seen that longer articles are aiming at a more ‘niche’ market – niche markets get good SEO in general.
• It is hard to waffle on about something for 2000+ words – it can be stereotypically, if that is a word, seen that longer articles are usually written by people who are an expert in the field they are writing about – the quality of the content is going to be good.

Therefore, if you find that your articles are not getting any organic traffic, the reason for this might be because your articles are too short for good SEO to occur. I generally like to keep articles at a minimum of 500 words and a maximum of 1,500 on any article I write online (I set a maximum because beyond that and it will affect other statistics such as my bounce rate etc.). 400 word articles are scrapping the barrel. But, anything under 400 and it is really not worth publishing if you are hoping to get organic traffic from it.

#2 Don’t Make Your Title Too Long

Another area many people forget about is the length of their title. Of course, it is not good to have a short title because, like we explained in the first tip, it is harder for search engines to understand your content if you don’t provide much. However, at the same time, having too long a title for your article is going to hinder the performance of the article too.

The reason for this is because many search engines set a limit of characters before the title snippet in search engine results is cropped with a ‘…’ at the end. Below is an example of this:

This example is not too bad as it is only the website name being cropped at the end. However, it brings the point forward that having too long an article will hinder your SEO performance too – search engines won’t like it as much. But, more importantly, less people are likely to click onto the article if they cannot read and understand fully what the article is about.