SEO page length 4500+ words

[Llanero]

I have read varying discussions on this... some say it is good or rather it does not really matter (as long as not stuffed with keywords)  and some say more than 1000+ words  is bad!

I have a travel site and I want to add an historical page about the zone. It is very interesting (very organic, not written for SEO purposes as such). It adds flavor and details to a site that is really all about sales.

Does anyone have an opinion whether this is detrimental to SEO or not?

[WhoWuddaThunk]

It won't hurt your site if that's what you are asking.  Will it rank well?  Really depends on how your organic writing style relates to SEO.  Is it broke up into sections?  Do those sections of decent headers?  Are their pictures?  Are the pictures named appropriately?

[mememax]

Hi Rose, as far as I can remember Matt Cutts always says: "build your website for your users not for the search engines". In that sense you should have a look at your new content as an user of your site and imagine if he would benefit from it or not. If you think that the content is useful, than it's definitely better to publish it.

So SEO doesn't decides if this article is valuable or not, but structures it in the way you would benefit the best. I think that it would be useful to have it on one unique URL. Any link you may achieve will point to the same page, and with a wise usage of internal anchors you'll obtain a quite interesting user navigation. What it may create you problems is the page loadtime, 1000+ words is not detrimental to SEO but it could be if the page load time goes up a lot. So use wisely your images and optimize them in order to get a faster response.

Always point to add more flavour to the site, because you want users to return not to only buy something and leave.

[Llanero]

So really if I keep the photos small or limited to reduce load time this would be ok.

Good to know. I thought about doing it on a few pages and labeling it:

1  history before 1960

2. political history etc

3.        all on different URLs but it really disrupts the flow. Like I said it doesn't really have sales value but it is interesting and I want my site to be partly informational not just sales.

Thanks for your advice. It is amazing how many different options there is on this one subject!

[mememax]

yes, there are many options, always depending on how well are you able to maintain the page load time efficient. I think that having everything in one page without making it boring or overwhelming for the user is the best choice.

About images be sure that you're uploading he images in the size you're using without scaling them with css, because a 10001000 image even if shown as 100100 always weights as a 10001000, so rescale it and upload it as 100100.

[ThompsonPaul]

Here's a post from last week that specifically addresses your question, Rose, and includes some hard data.

http://www.detailedsuccess.com/perfect-blog-post-length/

I usually find mixing up the length of posts a bit to be useful, but there's absolutely no question that good-quality, well laid-out long posts can be very successful both as far as entertaining readers and for attracting links (especially from social media.) - both of which make for good SEO.

I've never yet heard anybody who claims "more than 1000 words is bad" back up that claim with any sort of believable, provable argument.

Paul

[EGOL]

Here are the things that rule my content development

1. Do not pay attention to length.  Write enough to cover the subject well, completely and in a very interesting way.  If you decide that I need 1000 words or 300 words or 5000 words - that is how you stink up a great article.

2. Publish lots of nice images with your content.  Splurge your budget on them.  Don't worry about the bandwidth.  Those images will be great for your  visitor.

3. Break up an article with lots of logical segments and communicate that with bold headings.  Lots of people scan an article for the headings and read the parts that are interesging to them.

4. Don't break a nice article across many pages - especially if you have lots of great images.  You want people who land on your article to say WOW!  Look at thoseimages... look at all of the interesting subheadings.  I am going to read this and share with my friendsd.  People don't want too click through six pages to read your article.  They don't.

[simon_realbuzz]

Article length should not matter. Just make it attractive and readable to the user. There are many sites that provide good lengthy content but break it up into readable chunks. I particularly like this example on the Verge site whereby a lengthy piece is broken up into neat segments and there is a useful 'jump to' feature on the left hand side which acts almost as a teaser to the content.