When you’re writing marketing material, service descriptions, or product descriptions – whether it’s for use offline or online – you know it’s important to use the right keywords. The difference online is that those keywords need to be “right” for the search engines as well as for your human readers.
Until search engines learn to read semantically (like humans), you should continue to write with the understanding that the quality of your ‘content‘ will be measured in those two ways: (1) with regard to what’s good for search engines; (2) and with regard to what’s good for humans.
You can probably read your own writing and tell whether you did a good job (as far as humans are concerned), but can you read like a search engine? The search engines’ goals should be to align their criteria with those of their human readers. In other words, it is Google’s intention to return search results related to what their users are searching for…so what works for humans will often also work for the search engines. But they still rely on quantitative measures like word use frequency – and lucky for you that’s one of the easiest things to test.
Check out this handy tool called Wordle.net – copy and paste your text (or enter the page URL) into the Wordle website, and Wordle will create a ‘word cloud,’ like the one below, which visually demonstrates the most common words you used in your writing. This helps you “see” at least one thing that both search engines AND humans are interpreting. If you see some large words that aren’t terribly pertinent to your writing, then maybe you should re-think using them. On the other hand, if the most important keywords are big and bold, you can pat yourself on the back (assuming readability hasn’t been sacrificed – a topic for another time).
Sure, there are other ways to analyze word count, but Wordle does it with style, don’t you think?
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