100 Words per category

[onlinemediadirect]

These are the numbers of words I have heard mentioned as being "good enough" for the categories of ecommerce pages. Even at a stretch 50 words maximum.

What are peoples opinions on the volume of words required ?

[EGOL]

Sure... 100 words... that's probably "good enough".... but in a competitive space don't you want "kickass"?

[onlinemediadirect]

Is it really needed though I know examples of sites with 50 words doing really well ?

granted the factors of link building are probably coming into play

[EGOL]

If you were google and you had a choice between two pages... one with 50 words and one with a few hundred.  Which would you think is higher quality?

We have pages with short content on our site.... but we are working to improve them.   When we improve a page from 50 words to a few hundred words that usually results in two things... 1) a ranking increase... and, 2) a lot more long tail traffic from the greater diversity of words on the page.

Time well spent.

[onlinemediadirect]

I was looking at the site sportsdirect.com as an example .

and comparing to other sites with less content ranking higher than them ?

search arsenal home shorts

[EGOL]

....comparing to other sites with less content ranking higher than them...

A lot more goes into rankings than the number of words on a page.

If I wanted to save money on content I could find a lot of examples of short copy sites that rank ahead of me.... but my attitude on this is..."The hungry person usually eats the other guy's lunch."

[blackballonline]

I don't think it's the quantity so much as the quality. EGOL alluded to this. Semantic processing of keywords in relation to other keywords in a context relevant to the search term is key. We have examples of this where our site beats much larger and authoritative sites on long tail keyword phrases even with their brand name included. This is as a direct result of the number of ways the keyword is used in relation to other keywords.

[AlanBleiweiss]

this is why I'm glad EGOL is around when I'm not.  Not only does he really know what he's doing from an SEO perspective, he runs his own site - proof from real world stuff.

Myopic SEO says "how little can I get away with".  Sustainable SEO says "What can I do to eventually dominate in this niche, and not have to play the games other sites do."

100 words?  Sorry - My recommendation to clients is 400 words on category pages, 1000 on information pages.

400 too much for you to swallow?  Start with 200 each.  Do other best practices SEO tasking - if you still find you're not getting the visits and conversions you want, write more high quality content.