Want to Improve Your Word Skills? Memorize These Numbers.
Posted by Gordon Plutsky on Tue, Nov 01, 2011
Guest Post from Anna Goldsmith of the King Fish Media Content Strategy Team. Follow Anna's blog at http://www.thehiredpens.com./blog/
I'm about as far as you can get from being a "numbers person," but as a professional copywriter, here are a few I live by. And if you’ve ever needed to write any marketing collateral — or even a decent sentence — you’ll commit them to heart. Trust me: They’re way easier to remember than a quadratic equation.
A Copywriter’s Guide to Perfect Numbers
• Sentence length: 15-20 words. Sometimes you need to go over, but once you hit 30 — even 25 — you are pushing your luck and better have a darn good reason not to throw down that period.
• Headlines: 8 words or fewer. Emphasis on fewer.
• Paragraphs: 30 to 60 words. Another way to think of it is two to three sentences. More than that is overwhelming. People sigh and turn away when they see large blocks of text, particularly on the Web.
• Web pages: 250 to 350 words. Write as concisely as possible. Ideally you don’t want to make people scroll.
• Keywords per Web page: 1-2. Try to optimize for too many words and search engines — not to mention users — miss the point.
• Tweets: 140, right? Wrong. According to Twitter experts, it’s 124. Here’s why: Use up all your characters and no one can retweet without cutting what you wrote. And since retweets are the whole point anyway, make it easy for your followers.
• Facebook status updates: 1-2 sentences. Sure, you’ve got 420 characters to play with, but don’t use them all. People don’t read status updates as much as they scroll through them, often digesting several per second. So unless you have a major fan base hanging on your every word, pithy is best.
Advanced numbers for non-math geeks.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about in the below section, you’ll probably never need to.
• Web page title tag: Google displays up to 66 characters, Yahoo up to 120. But come on, who uses Yahoo? Stick to 66.
• Web page meta description: 155 characters long.
There — that is the last you’ll hear from me on the subject of numbers.