Thin content is horrible. Here's why.

A quick guide to writing for the web.

Jay Holtslander

Technologist

Posted Mar 7, 2020

All too often there are incidents of people asking for a sentence or two to be made into a blog post. This is a bad idea for a website and this post serves to explain why.

Identifying worthless content

  1. If content isn’t longer than a paragraph or two then it’s not worth a blog post. A one or two sentence piece of content is better suited to a Facebook post or a tweet on Twitter.

  2. If the full content is the exact same length that the one or two sentence summary intro of the content would be, then it’s too little content to be worth a blog post or a page. Don’t annoy people who might click through to a full article based on its preview text only to discover that they’ve already read all the content that there possibly is to read before they even clicked.

At a bare minimum, blog posts should have 300–500 words. Having more than 300 words keeps a blog from being considered ‘thin content’.

The optimal length of a blog post is between 1000 – 2000 words. Longer posts generally perform better in search. Posts that are more than 2000 words receive more social shares. The average word length for a blogpost found in the first 5 positions of Google was aproximatly 1800 words. The average content length for Page 1 results is around 1,900 words, according to a 2016 study.

How to write a blog post

  1. Craft a headline that is both informative and will capture readers’ attentions.

  2. Provide at minimum a single image to enhance the post.

  3. Write your post, either writing a draft in a single session or gradually word on parts of it.

This short blog post that you are reading right this moment should be considered a rough guideline for a minimum amount of content that you should strive for.

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