Improve Your Writing with the Textalyser Keyword Tool

M. M. Lyons' article on keywords had an interesting way to explain keywords: "The powers that pay are looking for you to generate traffic to the site so that they can make their income, and thereby pay you yours. Keyword density is your literary call girl. Textalyser wants to be your madam." I seldom check keyword density because I've been working my business long enough that I have no need for a madam to tell me whether my keywords are working their business or not. But Textalyser does more than calculate keyword density. Look at the information you have to scroll past to get to the keywords:

Number of words:
Number of different words:
Complexity factor (Lexical Density):
Readability (Gunning-Fog Index): (6-easy 20-hard)
Average Syllables per Word :
Sentence count:
Average sentence length (words):
Max sentence length (words):
Min sentence length (words):

The three calculations I put in bold text might help you improve your writing. They are not, of themselves, measures of quality. However, high-quality writing seldom falls too far outside these parameters.

Complexity factor (Lexical Density [LD]) = (Number of different words / Total number of words) x 100

A score of 40-60 is average. A high score indicates that you seldom repeat words. A low score indicates that you are repeating many words. Whether this is good or bad depends on your purpose and audience.

Texts with a lower lexical density are more easily understood because they use the same word for the same concept wherever it appears. Red is red, not red, crimson, vermilion and scarlet. Overviews and roundups tend to score high, but so do rambling rants about the meaning of life and the injustices it inflicts on you. Children's books and writing meant for non-native speakers tends to have low scores.

If your writing scores above 60 or below 40, take a second look at it. Read it out loud to make sure it sounds OK. Make sure you aren't bringing in synonyms just because your English teacher said you should. Make sure you aren't mindlessly repeating keywords where you would normally use a referential pronoun such as "it" or "he" or a generic word like "auto".

Readability, or the Gunning-Fog Index is calculated by a formula that uses the word length, sentence length and paragraph length to estimate how readable your text probably is. Big words, long sentences and long paragraphs drive the Gunning-Fog Index up. Short words, sentences, and paragraphs bring it down.

There is no upper limit, but keep the Gunning-Fog score under 8 if you can. That doesn't mean you have to produce kindergarten style writing, or dumb-down your topics, but you have to have clear sentences and active verbs to hit that mark. If the index is higher than 10, it usually means you need to get rid of passive voice, prepositional phrases and clarify your sentence structure.

Average sentence length (words): This is just what it says: Number of words / number of sentences.

Remember that this is an average. Some sentences will be shorter and some sentences will be longer. If your average sentence length is under 10 words, you are either writing for children or you need to learn how to use conjunctions and subordinate clauses. A steady string of short sentences is bad. If your average sentence length is over 15 words, you are in the caution zone. If your average sentence length is over 20 words, you may be writing like a bureaucrat or a boring professor. You may have run-on sentences. Whatever it is, stop doing it!

What are the Magic Numbers?

So what is the magic score for each of these to guarantee high offers and a gazillion page views? There isn't one. These are broad guidelines, not a roadmap. Text can be grammatically correct, correctly spelled, with a Gunning-Fog index of 8 and a lexical density of 50 and still be boring and unsalable. However, if the text has a Gunning-Fog index of 30 or a lexical density of 90, I know it's not going to be readable.

Breaking boundaries is OK, but you have to be aware you are breaking them, and know why you need to break them. One of my articles has 109 words in a single sentence (see page 2). You cannot read that sentence out loud without running out of breath. The key is: I did it deliberately, to convey the long string of problems caused by the tenant's films.