Now, I know what some of you may be thinking but we are talking blog post size here people… you naughty types may be disappointed but we hope you’ll still love us (we do love you after all! LOL!) Two of our favorite bloggers are quite different in style: Chris Brogan writes shorter posts, more often – sometimes daily, and Olivier Blanchard writes longer posts less often. Both work and both pose problems: sometimes we are left wanting more with a post that feels too short, or we feel rushed and don’t have time to read and absorb a longer post.

We did some quick research to see if we could get any fact-based data to determine if post length really makes a difference with organic SEO…and wouldn’t you know it? The facts are prey to the argument as well. What we found from blogbuildingu.com is there is a keyword density issue that may factor into post length and seo – there also might be a cap that search engines limit in terms of words on the page they search. The post says “it seems to be the best practice that you should create content with at least 250-300 words and avoid exceeding the 1000 words limit.”

On the other hand, smallbusinesssem.com asserts that there is no perfect length and that variety is optimal.  At the end of the day, what we found is there are a variety of ways to help improve your SEO results and size is actually of minimal impact. If you are desperate for SEO improvement and willing to try and manipulate the search engines (remember, if they find out they may boot you all together) you can get some good tips and tricks from the seoblackhat.com masters directly. This whole site is dedicated to exploiting search so enter at your own risk.

We decided to take a look at one of our more popular posts to see if we could come up with any possible reasons to persuade us one way or the other. Our WordPress vs. Tumblr post is one the search engines seem to love based on our google analytics report. After reviewing the post we came up with three possible reasons it has had long-term search success….

1. We believe the post title can make a real impact if it includes solid keywords and popular phrases. WordPress vs. Tumblr is a phrase that people seem to search pretty often…at least per Google Adwords analysis tool.
2. We use the words WordPress and Tumblr throughout the post multiple times feeding the search engines the keywords they love.
3. We populated the ‘all in one seo pack’ plug-in for the post with all the information fields appropriately filled in.

Our final analysis… we should focus on WHAT words to use vs. how many. We shouldn’t get hung up with the number of words we write and instead just focus on writing…often.  At the end of the day, don’t let quantity hinder your quality. A short meaningful post is always going to be better than no post at all. We would love for you to share your preference in our comment section!

Cheers,

Lisa

Functionality & Control

A WordPress site can easily be expanded to replace your current site if you choose. WordPress is a robust Content Management System that has an easy user back-end that allows for page, plug-in, widget and sidebar updates to be made by non-tech experts. WordPress can support multi-page navigation and serve as a robust and comprehensive website with database management and control.  Wordpress is hosted on a server that is user controlled allowing better control over stats and personalization. We are actually switching many corporate sites done in asp or html to WordPress so that marketers, customer support and others in the organization can update content immediately, instead of having to wait for the marcom or IT department to update site pages for them. WordPress has the advantage of being installed on your own server.

Tumblr cannot be installed on your server… a site is hosted on the Tumblr platform, though you can use a unique url instead of the subdomain.tumblr.com address. You have complete control over your content, and can export it and move it to another platform if you want to take it off of Tumblr. For some reasons why we love Tumblr, read this older post called, aptly, Why Tumblr? that Kristi we published some months ago.

Cost and Usability

Tumblr is typically cheaper as it does not require the installation and configuration that WordPress does – the cost for hosting a Tumblr site is free, and our cost for custom Tumblr design is less expensive than it is for a custom WordPress theme, because it is much simpler to code (also more limited.) Tumblr offers an extremely user friendly dashboard that makes updating posts easy for text and multimedia alike.  Tumblr is also easy to update from your mobile device.

WordPress also offers a fairly simple to use back-end and supports multiple media formats. The cost of the WordPress platform is free, but custom design and hosting is not. (You can use wordpress.com for free, I think, but your functionality and design choices are much more limited.)

Design, Customization and Integration

With WordPress you can create different layouts for internal pages, posts and your homepage.  Tumblr on the other hand is limited with one type of page layout that must be applied on every page on the site, and the url’s for those pages are really ugly – this is the one for “About Kristi“ from her personal site.) WordPress supports widgets/plug-ins that can easily be added/customized without hard coding vs. Tumblr that must be custom coded for pseudo plug-in functionality. WordPress allows you to include native calendars and contact pages which mean you can update them all from the same WordPress back-end. Tumblr can support calendar and contact pages but only from third party sites that requires a separate log-in from the Tumblr back-end and some trick coding.

Search Engine Optimization, Ads and Performance

WordPress is very friendly with the search engines and can be easily optimized with various plug-ins added to the back-end. WordPress can also easily support ads which can be placed in different places on different pages as you choose.  Wordpress also has clean code in the back-end which allows for faster performance providing a better user experience.

Tumblr and SEO is not something we know how to optimize at present. We are researching it. There are some trick coding ways you can do ads, but nothing straightforward.

Bottom line: we recommend WordPress to some clients, and Tumblr to others. It depends on what you want to do, who your audience is, what your technical threshold is for learning, and who is going to be using the site to write content. Both are great platforms in their own right, and we will continue to provide services for both. What do you use for your sites or blog? Tell us in the comments!

In the coming months we will be covering a lot more about the art of blogging from the technological to company processes and cultural aspects to design and content approaches, so let us know if you have any burning questions and we will try to cover those first – we’re fortunate to be friends with many prominent bloggers/consultants and if we don’t have the answer, will tap into our network of friends to find it.

But this overview covers a lot of great reasons “why” you should have a blog… and we strongly believe most companies should. Check it out…