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SEO Tip of the Week: Write Like an Eighth-Grader

Reblogger
Real Estate Agent with Alain Pinel Realtors CalBRE#00979900

 

Michael George has some tips for writing blogs for everyone and ranking for readability on Google.  It turns out that Google ranks your site for readability, which in their case is writing for an eighth grader. Michael also offers site where you can see if your blog ranks for readability.

 

eighth graderWe all know that good content is crucial to SEO or search engine optimization. 

Well, I recently ran into a very unique problem. I have a client who is an attorney and has a website with about 600 articles, all original, and all rich with great keywords and usable information.

"Okay, this is an easy SEO job," I thought.

With that much content, I figured that once I rewrote all of the titles and descriptions, organized the categories properly, set up Facebook and Twitter, etc.-- I would be good to go. I would look like a hero. Because, if you've been paying attention, we all know that "content is king."

But even after I made a bunch of changes, the site didn't rocket to page one, as I expected it to. It turns out there was a problem with the content that I never anticipated.

Write for the General Public, Write Like an Eighth Grader

Ponder this for a moment: When you do a search for something to do with "constitutional law"- as one example- if Google really wanted to provide the best information, the top ten results should include the Harvard Law Review, maybe an official government site, and tons of scholarly articles.

But Google doesn't really give us "the best" information, do they?

No, what they give us is the most readable and usable information to the most amount of people.

Unfortunately, the average American reads on about a 7th or 8th grade reading level.

So if you own Google (stock), and you want to reach the largest group of people (making your stock price more valuable), are you going to serve scholarly articles or are you going to mix it up a bit? For any business, you always want to hit the top of the Bell Curve.

The Flesch Reading Test

It turns out that Google calculates "readablity" when ranking your site. That means my attorney's website was too sophisticated. The articles were written on a level that only an attorney could understand-- or at least-- a college educated person.

So, I started making the articles easier to read. This does not mean that I dumbed them down.

Not at all.

This means that I made shorter sentences and did not use crazy-long words. Attorneys can be very verbose; so I took a thirty word sentence and said the same thing in 12 words.

If you use the Yoast SEO Plugin for Wordpress, it automatically checks your article's readability. I will post a video on that in my third installment of using the Yoast SEO plugin. You can find parts 1 and parts 2 here.

If you are blogging here on ActiveRain, you can check your article's grade level by pasting the whole thing into this tool:

http://www.online-utility.org/english/readability_test_and_improve.jsp

By the way, I plugged this article into the test and it's at an 8th grade level-- perfect!

You can see my results below.

Being able to write informational content, and have it understandable to the most amount of people is one major key to good SEO. Forget keyword stuffing. Cater to the bell curve and you will rank better.

That's what Google wants.

flesch kincaid readability test

 

az seo guru

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