I was cobbling together – err, finely honing some copy for a website recently, and came across this nice little utility. There might be others like it, but I just found this one very quick and easy to use.
It analyses text, giving FOG values (very handy for a copywriter nervous about how accessible their writing is), but even better than that, analysis of word frequency. This is really useful for keywords.
So, let’s say I want to know what the most common words are in, oh I don’t know, music. Well let’s see what happens when I copy and paste the first 10,000 characters of the entry for that from Wikipedia. The results are that, by frequency, the main words mentioned are musical, baroque, classical, forms, composers, edit, ancient, romantic and instruments.
So, straight away, you’ve got some good starting points for keywords. By their nature they’re the most popular which, granted, won’t differentiate your SEO copywriting, but at least you know they tend to be referenced in that subject area.
This was just a quick example. It works more effectively if you go through several websites and analyse the copy from them. You really do find surprising keywords that appear very frequently.
The only way to improve this utility would be to have the ability to supply a URL instead of copying and pasting text. But that’s quibbling.
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congrats on dropping the kinda-sorta secret identity.. I#m not quite there yet.
-P
It’s a nice feeling, like wearing freshly laundered underwear. I highly recommend it.
Brendan:
Thanks for the link and the tool you mention in this post. Good to know you by your real name. Thought you might enjoy reading this post on PR and keyword research: http://tinyurl.com/2buazz
Barbara, writing from BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas