Will your Word Count Impact Visits?
Douglas KarrThanks for stopping by my personal blog on Marketing Technology! Over 50,000 visitors a month find my content worth returning for, so don't forget to subscribe to the Marketing Technology Blog RSS feed or to the Marketing Technology Email to have new content sent directly to your inbox. You may also find my other business blog helpful, Social Media Domination.
Yesterday, I wrote how to calculate your Word Count using MySQL on your blog’s postings in Wordpress. I wanted to analyze my posts to see if my blog was impacted by how long my posts were. Here are the results!
Page Visits vs. Word Count
The result? With six months of daily posts (sometimes multiple posts per day) and the associated word count for each day, I can absolutely state that the number of words did not make a difference. What did make a difference was simply the quality of the posts. As you can see, my blog didn’t suffer when I had short posts nor when I had long posts.
Key to a blog is writing great posts, not writing for search engines! Keyword density may index your page properly, but backlinks from other sites will propel your blog to the top of the results pages. I would trade a backlink to a perfectly keyword-riddled post any day!
If your style is long-winded (like me), you’re going to attract certain readers who enjoy viewing the many spelling and grammatical errors I make. 
The number of visits to my blog has remained consistent and growing!
It’s important to note that my site suffered quite a drop in search engine traffic (about 20%) when I switched my domain name and awaited reindexing from Google.
The anomaly towards the end was due to the ongoing popularity of my Starbucks devaluation post - one of the most popular of this blogs… and also one of the longest.
