There is disagreement among the blogging community on the issue of post length. As you’ll see, there are pros and cons in writing short and long posts.

Attention Span of Readers

Many believe that web-surfers have short attention span. Several studies showed that blog readers can spend as little as 96 seconds per blog. As a result, many blogs are intentionally kept in short length so their meat can be scanned easily.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Many SEO experts believe that very short and very long web pages are not ranked by search engines as highly as contents with median length. An average length for web content is 250 words, and many set the maximum length at 1,000 words.

Number of Posts

Unlike the popular SEO theory on post length, the “short is better” theory claims that the more posts are there in a blog, the better will be the flow of traffic via  RSS and Search Engines. It is believed that Engadget and Gizmodo grew their readership by setting their post lengths at minimum length so as to write as many posts as possible.

Topic or Genre

Oftentimes the length of the post is determined by its topic. For instance, it is often that you come across product reviews that are longer than a news brief that points to an external link for more in-depth coverage.

Comprehensiveness

Usually bloggers just allow the topic of their post to determine how long it should be. However, it doesn’t mean that you can go as long as a thesis. The rule of thumb is to write just enough to comprehensively cover your topic. It is unsound to observe either short or long post without considering its comprehensiveness.

I advise you to try various post lengths and see which works better. Moreover, by dividing your content into short, long and medium-length posts, you’ll be able to give the right amount of coverage for certain topics while catering to the needs of several groups of readers.

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