There is an ongoing debate on post length. Some like Steve Pavlina, feel that you shouldn’t get caught up with post length. He prefers to develop an idea in totality and post it, whether it ends up being a half a page or three pages. Darren Rowse recommends keeping your posts to around 400 words. This is the amount of words the average person reads in one minute.
I would like to recommend an approach that blends both opinions and improves your search-ability.
When you have a long post see if it can be broken down into smaller concepts. Then create separate posts for each concept, and within that post link to the other posts that make up the whole topic. Your first post is like the Intro, so in the following post, begin the body of you post with “this post is part of the # part series yada yada”, and at the end identify the next post on the topic followed by other posts in the series.
You can see and example of this with my post  20. I Wanted to Make My Own Mistakes, Until I realized that It Was Much Easier to Let Others Screw Up.
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Keep in mind that you should title each post according to its own concept. It should not be “How I found my dog (part one)†, “How I found my dog (part two)â€Â, etc. Using the previous example your first post could be “How I found my dogâ€Â, your second post would be “Getting the word out on my lost dogâ€Â, or just “Getting the word outâ€Â.
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The purpose with this post style is not to post each part on a separate day – which is sometimes done when a blogger is developing an idea over a period of time and want to post his progress – but to post all at once.
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The benefit of this style is that, when people are searching for information they are inclined to pick the post that has the information that they are searching for in the title. If you did a search for “strategy implementationâ€Â, you might get a list of post that have those words in the body of the text, but that doesn’t mean that strategy implementation is discussed there. It might only be in one sentence. If it is in the title, then you know that it will be discussed in detail. By giving each separate concept its own post and title you improve your chances of being found, clicked and linked.
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Please share your results after trying this method.
