There's no correlation that I can see. I have some 50 word posts made years ago that drive great traffic and some 1,500 word ones that don't.

It's more 'common wisdom' or 'BS' being spread by the usual suspects.

It's not the matter of counting the words in articles and contents appearing on pages of websites because originality and freshness of the materials will be the key elements in here. If you spend time and use your writing skills to create contents for people and readers to study and enjoy, your contents will pay off via boost in web rank and traffic share and even winning some strong, editorial links. Your contents could have one hundred or ten thousand words in them and doing fine.

People who are obsessed with words possibly are submitting too many contents to article directories and some of them as you know have rules that reject materials that are fewer than five hundred words per content page. These are fictions in the modern SEO world and try staying away from such artificial theories which never work online. Original content definitely helps but it is not the quantity of the words used but quality of the artworks created, so try to write very well.

The main advantages to longer posts is that they offer more chances to rank, because they contain more keywords.

People these days seems to want to write bigger posts because they don't have the link equity to spread across more smaller ones.

Really, the key to creating content is to make it as compelling or in-depth as it needs to be.

dont count words,count keywords!keywords number on 1 page really matters!more wors-more keywords.

It doesn't matter how long your article is as long as it quality article. Google now loves quality. So focus on quality content.

yea if you're talking about ranking for a particular keyword vs just writing articles with longer length..well then there are many facets to getting ranked other than article length. SEO is so misunderstood and really some sites that get ranked often times seem on the surface to be crappy sites that should be on page 10.

I've found that a page with at least 800 words, tightly structured around the targeted keywords, performs better in the search engines.

It used to be quantity > quality. Now its reversed!

I mean, why would small e-commerce sites rank well? After all, they do not have that much content ... Their main asset is the number of quality backlinks.

Google now ranks sites according to type. Ecommerce, blog, info based etc are all ranked with different algorithims, also the fact that they use custom info from the searcher is a big factor now, this means you may not have the same results I do on the same search term.

It comes down to your niche. The panda update goes after low quality content. Look at the quantity and quality of the top guys in you niche.

I think a page you are ranking for a competitive keyword should have 500 words on it, only because that seems like a small amount of data. Not every page needs 500 words however the objective of a search is to find a result and 500 seems like enough to provide an solid result.

I think you're confusing content in terms of quantity with content in terms of quality.

Just because an article is 500 words does not mean that it is high quality content. Strong content is still very important. Many of the ecommerce websites typically rank better because their content serves a purpose, and the short summary of the product is leaps and bounds better quality content than the niche site that hired a non-native English writer to write 500+ words of articles.