Minimum words per page?

[RachelW]

I remember being told by someone that any web page should contain at least 300-400 words to rank well in Google.

We are redesigning our website, and our left-hand navigation menu options will appear as browsable text (previously they were in Javascript).

Can anyone advise whether the text on the menus can/should be included in the minimum 300-400 word count, or whether that number applies exclusively to each page's unique content?

Thank you.

[crazylogic]

I would agree that you should have at least that many words, but it is not a "rule" it is more of a style that allows for multible combinations of keywords.

The direct answer to your question is yes, all of the text words in the html file or shtml file count (including the words provided by SSI) but i would look at what the content is to see if it is on-topic to the content of the page. If it is not on-topic then I would not consider the extra words any help and increase the on-topic content on that page.

Personally, most of the content I've been creating lately has an HTML size of about 10K up to 20K, focuses on two main words and a few secondary words ...
IE Main words (Cake, Ice Cream) secondary words (Chocolate, Strawberry, Vanilla), mix main words and secondary words into titles, descriptions and headlines. Then I have lots of related words in the text of the page so that the page is relevant for chocolate chip ice cream, or chocolate birthday cake.

Depending on dynamics of the keywords you are using different styles work better than others as far as return on investment of time. If you offer services which have a large number of keyphases based on cities and towns a style that uses larger pages and more variation in keyword phases on the page may work better. If "Wedding Cakes" makes money for you it likely would be worth just targeting that phase on a mean and lean page. but the problem with mean and lean targeting is they are completely hit or miss., while larger pages tend to move to different keyword combos on algo changes.

[RachelW]

Thanks for this reply - it really helps a lot.