> No one has time to read your article, write the first lines like they’re a TLDR.
So true!
> For SEO don’t write short articles (>2000 words)
So sad!
So true!
> For SEO don’t write short articles (>2000 words)
So sad!
I've been noticing more and more that every time I'm looking for a recipe, I end up with a blog post the size of a novella as the first few results.
A recipe blog post where you can simply copy/paste the recipe into your notes app is going to receive a bad SEO grade.
That's why so much of the Internet feels so 'corporate' or make so many seemingly 'WTF' choices. They are optimizing around a monetization and growth strategy, not for your experience as a user.
Do many people actually copy-paste recipes? I usually open a recipe page and keep it open until I'm done with the dish). If I like the result I may copy the recipe.
In my experience the best approach to deal with this is the TLDR on top idea, so the Reader experience stays good and then going deep into the topic for the curious ones and the SEO juice
The recipe format was perfected in the middle ages - a simple list of ingredients and a description of the steps required. But the sites that capture the first page of search results for even the simplest recipe are all designed to keep you on the page long enough for the video ads to play through.
Listen up idiots, if I like your recipe I will be on your page for minutes figuring out how to follow it and will return every time I want to make the meal. Your stats will be favorable - no need to bother me with how your dead granny used to make roast beef sandwiches or whatever.
Just another way that advertising kills everything it touches.
It sure smells like shenanigans, I'm just not sure why.
The length of a text doesn't seem like it would factor into the outcome of the page ranking unless I'm missing something.
How would you determine what is a "good" or "bad" article, given a reader's preferences rather than one that simply gets associated most regularly with a search query?
Another explanation I've seen is for ranking longer texts higher is that longer text is assumed to be of higher quality because it's more content/took more work to produce/whatever.
Whatever the reason, this leads to the rambling articles I mentioned, which seems to be a trend even for cases when the actual useful content is short.
If there's more and more pressure to say less, eventually you'll say nothing. If you say everything, nobody will read it unless they have eyes set on your work.
Most people seem to be trained to write an expository piece in a classical model of assert a premise => provide an argument => yield a conclusion. They're not used to putting the conclusion where the premise should be sort of like an abstract.
Which one are you going to read first? If you picked the first one, does that indicate a dilapidation in reading ability, or that you needed an answer, and the first option provided the best one?
Surely we read more than we ever did? Surely more people a literate than ever before?
Certainly we didn't read much television...
My friends that are dyslexic or illiterate have learnt to read in their 30s and 40s because of the internet.
I wonder if it only applies to new blogs though? Perhaps if you have good DA/PA/TTF metrics already then it doesn't actually matter about your content length.
I am genuinely interested in the answer to this though. The idea that the article has to be longer/more detailed than the competition makes total sense.