If you want to get traffic to your website, you need content on it.

But how much content?

A few hundred words per page?

More?

And what kind of content?

The amount of content you need on a particular page is driven by the subject (title) of the page.

If you can explain everything that you need to in a few hundred words, that’s what you need to do.

If it takes a thousand words or more, that’s what’s needed.

Google doesn’t have any hard and fast rules for the number of words on a page.

That said, there’s a general consensus that much less than 300 words doesn’t give Google’s algorithm much to go on when it’s deciding what the page is about.

Although (as always with computers) there are exceptions – you’ll often read people asking in forums why a page with only a handful of words has ranked high. The answer is usually because there’s no competition for that keyword and no-one searching for it.

I tend to aim for at least 500 words on any page I’m writing content for – that’s pretty much my personal minimum target nowadays but I don’t stop mid-sentence if I reach that number and I will write less words if I’ve said all I want to say on the topic.

But quite a few of my pages will run nearer 600 to 1,000 words. Sometimes more.

I’m still very much of the view that the main content of the page should be written – mainly because Google does a much better job of indexing that kind of content.

Sometimes I’ll use pictures that are relevant to the content – I do that on a few pages on this site – but if there’s no relevant picture that I’ve got, I don’t add a picture just for the sake of it.

The same goes for videos – if they add to the written content, I include them otherwise I don’t.

It’s generally thought that videos help to increase the amount of time that people spend on your site and, since Google use that as one of their algorithm factors, it’s probably a good idea to do that if they fit with the rest of the page.

You can get the code from YouTube to embed a video in your page or, if you’re running WordPress or similar, you can just grab the URL of the video from your browser’s address bar and paste it into the post or page.

Likewise if you’ve got PDFs or other documents relevant to the page then you can include links to them on the page.

The actual content you write should be written naturally.

Don’t get hung up on things like keyword density – that varies according to the content you’re writing about as well as your writing style – just make sure that your page reads naturally.

A good rule of thumb is that if it sounds unnatural or spammy, it probably is!  In which case you’d probably need to re-write it so that it read better.

Other than that, weave in some links in relevant places and then move on to the next relevant piece of content.

The more chances you give Google to find your site (which means the more pages you have on your site) the more likely it is to rank you for at least some of those and send you some traffic.

If you’d like to know more about creating the content for your website, check out my content creation crash course.

And feel free to add your comments in the box below.