How long should a blog post be?

There are people who say you should write blog posts with between 1,000 and 3,000 words.

Other people pack their blog posts with keywords and hashtags.

Both strategies claim to boost your blog post up the search engine rankings. This sounds suspiciously like trying to game SEO (search engine optimisation). But why would you want to do this? What's the point of being at the top of someone's Google or Bing search if they're looking for something different from what you're offering?

Maybe that's not the best thing to do.

Have you noticed that your attention span is shorter when you're reading things on your smartphone? And that your tolerance for boredom, repetition and padding is so much lower? Think about that for a moment.

People reading your blog on their smartphones will soon get fed up of scrolling down. Long paragraphs are so tiring to read. As are long sentences that wrap from one line to the next to the next to the next without any punctuation to break them up.

We've got a few suggestions for you.

How about writing what you need to about your subject, and then stop. Be concise: leave your readers sated (satisfied) but wanting to treat themselves to another helping from your blog.

And break your text up. Like this. Vary your sentence length; write grammatically, but try to keep your writing style fairly close to your speaking style.

When you're finished, stop - like we're doing now.