In the world of SEO, website owners often want to know how many words their website’s pages should contain. Unfortunately, there is not a single answer for this question. There are website’s out there that only have a hundred words or less per page that rank very well in the search engines. Then there are websites which have a thousand words in a page but also rank very well.
When you are thinking about word count, it is highly important to think about quality over quantity. Quality is necessary from a user’s perspective and also from the search engine’s perspective. If you have a lot of information to share, do you really want to cut out the majority of the information? Won’t your users feel cheated if they only received half of the information due to it being shortened?
From a search engine’s point of view, the engine wants to know what your website is about so they can properly index it and rank it. The number of words you should have on your web pages should be long enough so that the search engine can detect what your website is about. It should also be short enough to not be filled with fluff words or words that are not relevant.
Search engines look for quality content with good keywords and proper keyword saturation. They are looking for web pages which are important and relevant. If you can write two hundred words which contain the keywords for the web page in the proper density, why would you want to write more? Or if you have an article which is one thousand words long but only part of it contains relevant information, cutting out the filler words is not a bad idea.
While there are no set amount of words that you should or should not use, most will agree that the average amount of words per page should be around five hundred. Remember however, that more or less words will not put your website in jeopardy if the content is of high quality. There is a better chance of losing search engine rank if you have poor quality content than there is the chance that you will lose it over too many or too few words.