It is often said that if you own a blog, you should post blog entries regularly and frequently. And you should post articles that are lengthy enough so that search engines would index them. They say that if you consistently post lengthy articles in your blog, the rankings and the traffic would eventually begin to improve for your blog.

But how often is often? And how lengthy is lengthy?

Length And Frequency Of Posts

The short answer is IT DEPENDS.

The long answer is that different bloggers have different niches and different styles of writing. If you have an entertainment gossip blog, it would only make sense if you post frequently updated posts about gossips in the entertainment industry. They may be short and direct. But the more important thing is that it is fresh and frequently updated.

If you have a blog about book reviews, it naturally makes sense that you would not be able to make posts every single day – unless, of course, you can devour one whole book every single day, and even have the time to write the review that you would also post in your blog. But the posts that you would write would naturally be lengthy enough for your readers to find value in your writings.

In terms of frequency, I guess the matter of consistency is the more important concern. If your readers expect you to post every single day, then make an effort to produce a post everyday. If it’s once a week, then post one article every week. If your posting schedule becomes erratic, you may begin to lose some loyal readers.

Targeting The Longtail

Okay, so you say that you are not exactly targeting loyal readers, but more of the visitors from search engines. For you to drive more traffic from the search engine, not only must you rank highly for the keywords that you are targeting with your blog posts. But you should also rank for many longtail keywords. And the only way for you to rank for many longtails is to produce more content for the search engine spiders to index.

The more content your website has, the more keywords it would rank for, even if you do not exactly aim for them. In fact, if you have a pretty large website, more than half of your organic traffic would probably come from longtail searches that did not even cross your mind while you were writing those posts.

So, how often is often? And how lengthy is lengthy? It depends. As long as you keep the search engine spiders happy with your content.