How Many Words Should be in a Hub?

When I read a question like the one that inspired this answer - "How Many Words Should be in a Hub?" I start with the assumption that anyone writing an article for the internet would like to get it read. It's not just out there for friends and family but for the whole world. Assuming that you would like to have your hubs read as widely as possible it makes sense to leverage the know-how of article marketers.

Article marketers are people who are trying to drive traffic to their website(s) with article on sites like HubPages. They leverage HubPages authority to rank well in Google fast. Whether you wish to run your own site or just have your hubs read by a lot of people the way you want to write your hubs is the same. Here are a couple of tips:

• Pick 1 narrow topic - for article marketers this would be the primary keyword or keyword phrase
• Put the keyword in the hub title and at least 1 subsection heading
• Have your keyword show up once for about every 50 words
• Write your articles to be about 300 to 500 words (I violate this and write much longer articles a lot)

As I stated before I often write longer hubs and articles for my article marketing than the generally accepted wisdom would suggest.  I find that many topics just can't be well addressed in 500 words.  This probably just means that I should learn to write more succinctly.  However, it also presents an opportunity.

Assume you write a 700 word article.  This article can, in my experience, be broken up into multiple - 3 to 4 - articles of 300 to 400 words.  They become more like teaser articles but they are often better at driving traffic to my website simply because the question isn't fully answered in the article - obviously getting visitors to my site(s) is better business.

From a hubbers standpoint, writing a big article and then rewriting it as multiple smaller articles is still a good way to drive traffic.  You just drive traffic to the larger article and to your profile.  Once at your profile people can see everything you've written not just the article they originally found.  And the more articles you write the more likely it is that someone finds something they like, becomes a fan, etc.

How Many Words Should be in a Hub: Short Answer

300 to 500 words is an ideal length for getting search engine (Google's) attention.  Following some article marketing guidelines should help get your hub read by more people.

How Many Words Should be in a Hub: Long Answer

You want your hub read by as many people as possible.  Article marketing guidelines are a result of lots of people writing articles to be read by as many people as possible.  The most important guideline to getting good traffic is picking the correct keyword phrase or topic.  Pick a topic that doesn't have a million pages on it already.

Once you have enough people reading your material you can write a hub on a topic with a million competing pages and at least your audience will still read it and pass it on.  Do this before you have an audience and that article/hub is likely to never be read by anyone.