There is a fine balance between too long and if you amount to blogging. Too long and your readers get bored, too little and the search engines will ignore you. Accept less than 200 words is clearly not enough the importance of search engines, how long should you write a blog post?

Beware the attention span
Why is a long post too long? Well maybe people have a short attention span especially, when reading things on the internet. And when your post has only ran to 1000 words of detailed text, then they are likely to read to the end. Is this a problem? Of course – that if they get bored before they finished they are unlikely to go to another post to read and almost definitely not going to come back in the future. By providing too much, you turn them off as returning visitors for life.

Personally, I think the blog posts in the order of 400 to 500 words, work very well in search terms. less than 400 and you can not seduce the search engines into your pages.

If it is too large, split
This actually gives us a very smart guide. If you get mail order from 800 to 900 word, it can simply be split into two equal halves of 400 to 450 words each. Each is large enough to entice the search engines in order to take a stake, while small enough to give the reader a break at the end and you have the advantage that they can send half page to read information.

Style, not just size
Of course, much also depends on your writing style and content of your post. It’s not just how many words are there in the post, but also how it is presented. As a web designer I am often given blocks of text from the new website owners that run to hundreds of words per paragraph. This can be very difficult to read.

So if keeping the blog post to a reasonable reading limit, make sure that the layout makes it easy to read. Shorter paragraphs are easier to handle on the page and if you can, add multiple titles if you look at various aspects of the work to introduce. It tells your visitor what’s coming next and makes them easier to handle.

And the answer is …
Yes, how much is too long? Well blog posts in the order of 800 words can be safely split into two posts, maybe even shorter by the time you close the first half and an introduction / refresh in the second post. But also keep an eye on that layout for easy reading and more interesting.