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If you are spending time writing a blog or a page for your website, you want to make sure that people actually read it and that you get the most out of it where search engines are concerned. With that in mind, please consider the following.

Readability

The math equation in the graphic below may have already sent you running scared from this blog. But if you want to know whether your blog will actually be read by most users of your website, pay attention. Luckily, if you have MS Word, you don’t have to do any math (look at the bottom of this blog for instructions.)

The math equation is called the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Score and it ensures you are writing in plain, understandable English. It’s important when writing for the web because psychologically speaking, people don’t want to do as much mental work reading your website as when reading a novel or newspaper.

In other words, keep it simple and they might stick around longer.

Readability Part 2

  1. Use white space, bullets, numbering, and good punctuation.
  2. Keep your sentences and paragraphs short.
  3. Use appropriate jargon. For instance, since ours is a technology related site, I could feel safe referring to search engine optimization or readability scores.

Search Engine Optimization

You really should leave Search Engine Optimization for the most part to your experts (hey, that’s us!) but when writing content, here are a few things anyone should do:

  1. Web crawlers can’t read images so tell them what the image is and include at least one keyword.
  2. Your title is the first thing the search engines read, so think about it and put a keyword or two in there, also.
  3. The same keywords in your picture and title should also be in your text.

For instance, for this article, my title keyword is website content and my image keyword is website readability. Hey look, those keywords are now in my blog a couple times. Yay me.

Figuring your Flesch-Kincaid Readability Score

Just in case the math equation still scares you and you don’t have MS Word, here’s a simple way to figure your score:

  1. Multiply the average sentence length by 1.015
  2. Multiply the average word length by 84.6
  3. Add the two numbers
  4. Subtract that total from 206.835

You want your score to be somewhere between 60-70 generally. 0-30 is WAY too high level for the average blog. 90-100 is probably too simplistic.

Here’s how you figure your score in MS Word:

  1. Go to Word Options
  2. Choose Proofing
  3. Ensure that the grammar with spelling box is checked
  4. Select the tick box for “Show readability statistics.”

Just in case you were wondering, the readability score of this blog is 66.3. Nailed it.

Readability

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