Write Just Enough Content
There are no "ideal lengths" of content, only enough to satisfy user intent and the context in which they're querying.
WordsI remember when everyone had their favorite best practice of word count. It was a time of keyword density and keywords meta tag stuffing. They were good days, but they had to come to an end (though some still live in that dismal past!).
Here's the real truth about word counts:
Write just enough and not too much!
There really is no ideal length, but there isan ideal question: "Should this page exist?"
The answer should consider primarily:
The page's uniqueness (based on other pages on the site).
Its uniqueness (based on other pages on the web).
Its value to users (does it answer a question they may have? FYI, analytics is your friend for engagement metrics!).
Its accessibility from a site's homepage (via clicks).
The content's ability to provide value with the correct media (image / video / text) so users are potentially inspired to share it!
Nowhere in these criteria does it mention the number of words, the ideal type of media, the density of keywords, or any of the other traditional optimization tactics.
Also, with Google's launch of "long form" modules in the results page, the need not to count words, keywords, paragraphs, and characters is underscored!
Help Search Engines Find Your Site
Search engines read through huge volumes of information on the Web with software programs called "robots" or "spiders" (because they navigate, or "crawl," through the Web). These spiders create an index which contains, essentially, all the pages they've found and the words that are contained on them.
You need to make sure your Web site is included in those indexes. You can easily check to see if your site has been indexed by Google's index by searching "site: www.yourdomain.org" — i.e. site:WWW.BEGINNERHELP.BLOGSPOT.COM. This search will show a list of all the pages from your site that are included in Google's index (ideally, every page on your site).
If you're not included in the indexes — for instance, if you have a new Web site, or one without much traffic — none of the steps below will do much good until you are. How do you get included? You can submit your site to the search engines — to Google, or Yahoo for instance — but experts are divided on how useful this is. It's certainly not a quick way to be included.
A better way is to get other indexed sites to link to yours. You can start this effort with huge, general-interest directories like the DMOZ directory, but you're likely to have as much or more success with directories or listings related to your field. Is there an online directory of children's service organizations? Does your United Way have a listing of local organizations? Do your funders have a list of grantees online? Any of these (or ideally all of them, as per the next section) could provide the link you need to be indexed.
Some online services say they'll submit you to a lot of directories and search engines automatically. These generally aren't worth the money, as indiscriminate listings aren't nearly as useful as ones targeted to your sector.
Encourage Others to Link to You
Links from other sites to yours are a critical aspect of search engine optimization. A couple of links will help the search engines find your sites, but lots of links will show them that your site is a central, important resource for particular topics.
The more incoming links you have from credible organizations (that is to say, organizations that show up high on search engines themselves), the higher you will be listed in search results. To check to see the links that Google has indexed for your site, enter "link:www.yourdomain.org" into the Google search bar. The resulting list doesn't include every link from every site, but is a guide to the approximate quantity of high-quality links.
How do you get people to link to you? As we mentioned above, there are likely a number of organizations that have a list of organizations like yours. Ensuring you're included in all the relevant directories is a good start. See if partner organizations will link to you. Do a search on the phrases for which you'd like to be found and look for ways to get the organizations at the top of the search results to link to you. Think through content you could provide — perhaps reports, articles, toolkits, directories of your own — that would be so useful that organizations would be inspired to link to it.
Tag Your Content (Standard, Social, Schema)
Standard tags such a meta description, title, and header tags are still important for user engagement and core SEO optimization. New and necessary tags, OG for Facebook, Twitter Cards, and schema.org microdata formats are no-brainers.
In the late '90s when I was getting my feet wet in online marketing, there were few techniques and far fewer websites, leading to an ease and confidence in getting almost anything to rank for almost anything. Tags we swore by were titles tags, meta description tag, H tags and, of course, the meta keywords tag. The tools of a trade with few tools.
Fast forward to today and there are many more tags, markup and necessities to enable better crawling, indexing and viability to rank. Through all this, the title tag has remained above most of the bickering, continuing to be the primary clickable link in the search results and (by all consensus) an important part of search engine ranking algorithms.
These "oldies but goodies" - with the exception of the black sheep keywords tag - are still important from a blocking and tackling standpoint, but alone won't fundamentally rocket you to the top 10 of Google. These are the "Standards" which every SEO should understand, and also understand that Google may or may not decide to consider when presenting a result in the SERP.
Social tags are often overlooked, but Open Graph (OG) tags have gained importance (and will continue to) as Facebook's Graph Search continues to build and improve to a usable state (sorry Facebook). Other social tags that look to materially help SEO from a visibility standpoint are the Twitter Cardsthat "gives users greater context and insight into the URLs shared on Twitter, which in turn allows Twitter to send more engaged traffic to your site or app." (*love* social organic traffic!)
Schema Markup is probably the most exciting development over the past few years, and one gaining traction slowly, despite the protocols being backed by the major (and minor) search engines. At its core, schema markup allows search engines to better identify the structure of data, to facilitate more efficient crawling, indexing and presentation of search results. Google offers an excellent Schema Q&A – far more than even this article can contain – and the Schema website gives even more detail to assist in definitions and implementation.