But with the amount of content required to be successful, plenty of webmasters now outsource their article writing to freelance writers. Typically, the website owner will carry out research on the topics that are most of interest to their readers and will then task a writer to create these articles.
The length of the articles requested tend to depend on what you are using them for. As an example, blog posts tend to be in the 300-400 word region while those intended for submission to the article directories or for use on a website tend to be somewhat longer at around 600-800 words.
But unfortunately I'm starting to see evidence that these good old-fashioned guidelines we have all been using for years may no longer be totally accurate and I think it is time that we started to consider some alternatives.
You see, one of the things that Google looks for is anything that appears "unnatural" in the websites they visit. They like to see, for example, links pointing to a site from all over the internet - not from just one single location. They like to see content added to a site slowly over time rather than nothing added for months and then a sudden dump of new articles.
And I'm starting to think that while we are all aware of these factors and are doing our best to appear "natural" so as to not be penalised in Google's search engine rankings, we may be tripping ourselves up when it comes to article length.
When a ghostwriter is tasked with writing an article of 600 words for example, they may actually have said everything there is to say after 300 words and they then have to spend the rest fo the article padding it out to get to the wordcount their client has requested. Of course the opposite can happen - a writer may have difficulties squeezing everything into a few hundred words and may end up leaving out some important elements.
I believe these artificial article lengths that the internet marketing industry has decided on may therefore not only be looking rather unnatural to Google as they're all the same length on our sites, but they may also have their quality compromised as a result of those constraints.
I wonder how long it will take Google to notice this problem and as a result to start "demoting" sites whose articles are all the same length.
So I'm making a change. From now on I'm going to write as much as I have to say about a topic - no more and no less. When I've finished then that's how long the article is. By doing this all my articles will vary in length, will look totally natural and will offer my readers the highest quality possible.
Isn't it about time you considered making this change?
