Traditional searchable encryption schemes for clouds are generally based on TF-IDF vector space model, but they ignore the high-dimensional sparse characteristic of encrypted vectors. It will lead to substantial computational cost of inner product, and thus slows the search speed. In this paper, we propose a two-layer fast search index-based multi-keyword ranked search scheme (TFSRS) to address this problem. In the proposed TFSRS scheme, a keyword clustering-based equal-length dictionary partition (KCEDP) strategy is adopted to compress the document and search vectors, which benefits the process of inner product. Based on the strategy, a novel KCEDP-based vector space model (KCEDP-VSM) is proposed, and based on which, a two-layer fast search index (TFS-index) is presented. By using the TFS-index, secure inner product and symmetric encryption, the efficient multi-keyword ranked search scheme over encrypted cloud data is proposed. Experimental results show the better performance of the proposed schemes in search efficiency.