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.
November 28th, 2006 at 2:29 pm
If the number of words matter, it’d be helpful if the blog composing software (whether that be Zoundry or Wordpress’s composer) gave a count of the number of words in each posting.
Or maybe that’s just me… stats help me get perspective. I’m still looking for a plugin that would allow my readers to rate my postings along a set of criteria… any suggestions welcome.
November 28th, 2006 at 3:08 pm
Martin: check this out Star Rating. Secondly, how come you dont have your contact details readilt seen on your blog ? Thats a big boo boo.
Will cross post this comment later onto your site too
Rob: Yes, you are correct on that.. “giving each separate concept its own post and title you improve your chances of being found, clicked and linked.” ! !
Keep chugging, we’ll keep clappin
November 29th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
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Hey Rob this is a great post! Your blog has officially been added to my RSS list.
A couple of comments:
1. It was you advice on splitting up posts that resulted in me breaking up my posts into smaller chunks. You told me this a while back.
2. It also depends on the quality and topic of your posts. I was just reading before I came to this blog about the importance/unimportance of posting frequently at http://www.mpdailyfix.com/2006/06/w_why_blog_post_frequency_does.html. I truly agree that posting daily is not key but rather the quality and content. This is good news for as it would be impossible for me at this time to post everyday. My posts require a lot of prior research. I know I only have two posted but i have many that I am currently working on. This topic can be a post in itself
Martin: This blog has information on installing a rating script for wordpress http://www.ericsphotoblog.com/star-rating-bar/ if you’re still interested.
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