Today, I investigated my blogging habits and found a pretty sad scene. On average, I blog only 200 words a day, and sometimes even less. I am willing to change that. Since October 2013, I have been running a "Can you blog 365 days in a row" contest. I have been blogging for about eight months already, with a two-day failure. In October, I wrote 64 articles on average with 225 words per article.
Total word count by month:
The above graph shows how many words I have written in total over the past nine months. Since I started blogging back in October, it is apparent that I was really excited to blog and made a record word count of 14,404 words in October. However, my word count ratio gradually decreased, and in March, it reached its minimum of 3,604 words.
Average word count per article:
The above graph shows my average word count per article. The maximum is this month (240), and the minimum word count is in the last month (102). I was on a two-week trip last month and mostly blogged from my phone, which explains such a low word count.
Starting now, I am willing to write a minimum of 400 words a day. I chose this number because, although 2000 words in a day might be better, I am not quite ready to keep up with blogging every day and writing 2000 words in a day (per article). So I decided to align my blogging habits with search engine optimization. As seen from the graphs above, I am barely getting above 240 words per article, and in some months, it is even less. That is why 400 words per article is still a pretty high level for me, but I believe I can achieve this. Later on, I can increase my word count per article. Just to remind you, I am blogging every day, so it is vital to have articles every day. Of course, I could write one article per week with 2000 words, but in this case, it will not work.
How SEO is involved here?
According to my inner feeling and some authoritative resources out there, I have found that Google uses word count as one of the criteria for its SERP (Search engine ranking position). And if I have articles that are just 200 words long, there is a high possibility that my articles will not rank. Well, I am not saying they will not rank at all. They will. I am a live example of that.
My blog is receiving traffic from organic search, and for the last three months, it has been around 1000 visitors from Google search. It is not much, but it is not anything. It is a pretty modest result, I agree. So, considering different tactics to drive more traffic to my blog, I discovered that one of the bottlenecks is too many short articles. Too many short articles mean that I am losing long-tail possibilities. When a searcher searches, there are many combinations of keywords he/she will use on their search query on Google. By having longer articles, there is a greater chance of being found because longer articles have more words. More words mean more keywords, and more keywords mean a better possibility to rank.
What else can writing 400 words a day give me?
It could become a good habit for me, and I will learn how to write longer posts, argue and summarize.