In today's society, it's easy to think "bigger is always better." For most things, that's true: it's better to have more than less of everything from food to funds to free time. Search marketing is one of the few exceptions to that statement. While having enough content is absolutely vital, having too much is downright destructive to your results.
Too Much Of A Good Thing
Search engine optimization is successful when you and your SEO provider are able to show Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and the rest that your website provides valuable and useful content related to your target keywords. There are some criteria attached to the definition of "valuable" and "useful" even though Google is reluctant to publish hard rules. It is pretty obvious that you need to have a fairly substantial amount of content on your page in order for it to be useful. A page with no content at all is unlikely to have a lot of value to readers. After all, there's nothing to read! There is a notable exception to this: pages which consist entirely or almost entirely of images. Unfortunately, these just aren't very SEO friendly, and should be augmented with text even if the pictures explain the situation perfectly.
On the flipside, unorganized, disjointed, and overly long text isn't particularly useful either. People want targeted, efficiently presented information that explains things easily. They don't want to be distracted by a lot of useless junk content. If you have too much writing, the part of your content that answers the reader's questions will be lost in the shuffle. The result is that a potentially good, helpful website eventually gets branded as useless and starts dropping in the results.
Content, Bounce Rate, And Search Engine Optimization
One of the major ways that writing impacts your search marketing results is through bounce rate. Whenever someone visits your page through Google, Google tracks how long they stay and what other internal pages they visit while they are there. The longer they stay and the more internals they view, the higher your rank will become. If they're lingering, that presumably means they're interested and reading, which usually means that you've done a good job of presenting them with what they wanted to know.
If you have too many words, you'll overwhelm readers before they can even get started. You could provide something of incredible value, but if it's too long people simply will not even start reading it. In today's culture, humans require instant gratification and instant completion - long articles, while informative, don't provide that. If your content is anything less than crystal clear and well organized, the wall of text will be even more of a deterrent to visitors.
What's The Magic Number?
There is no one "magic" amount of content to target. As a general rule, don't go below 250 words. Anything less, and Google won't think you have enough to provide quality information to visitors. In most cases, going over 500 is excessive, and going over 750 should only be done in exceptional circumstances. If you're pushing at or above any of these boundaries, consider whether you might want to make subpages instead. These can be more individually targeted than something like a homepage, and can also rank independently and thus help your search engine optimization results.
Author writes about a variety of topics. If you would like to learn more about Search engine optimization, visit http://www.customermagnetism.com/.
