Article writers using content
marketing often overlook content readability when composing their articles. Writing
articles online for money must not only consider motivating readers to buy a
product. To make money writing online, authors must also provide readable
quality content.
With the advent of Google's stated
goal to improve a user's search experience, many websites and articles lost
their coveted positions in Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPs). Writing
online for money as a means of 'gaming' the search engines through keyword
stuffing, article blasts to thousands of article directories, and weak,
poorly
structured website content writing are gone.
Readability
Readability measures the grade level
needed to understand any document. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is one of
better known and most used measurements. Although it has come under criticism
for its simplicity, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level scale is still widely used and
can give you an idea of your article's readability.
You can determine your article's readability
with the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level scale which assigns a grade level to the
written material. MS Word provides a readability statistics feature found under
the spell check tab that determines your article's grade level reading score.
There are free utilities on the web
that allow you to copy and paste your document and the utility will return the
grade level score. You can find them with a 'free readability tools' search on
the internet.
The organic results will show
'basic', 'intermediate', or 'advanced' reading levels for each of the page results.
You make make money writing articles
online by targeting your reader.
Ideal Reading Level
If you dumb down your website
content writing, the reader may feel insulted and dismiss your words. You may
have quality content, but not readable by your targeted audience.
What is the ideal reading grade
level? Many claim that the national average reading level is eighth grade and
that article writers should write at that level or lower when writing for the
web. Studies have been conducted by various governmental agencies under the
U.S. Department of Education and by independent private agencies on various
aspects of literacy throughout the United States, but I have yet to
find any authoritative data that specifically identifies the national reading
average to be at the eighth grade level.
Adult Literacy in America
The study most often cited as the
source of the eighth grade reading level claim is a 1993 study, Adult Literacy
in America: A First Look at
the Results of the National Adult Literacy Survey, by Irwin S. Kirsch,
sponsored by the National
Center for Education
Statistics. The study did survey levels of literacy skills ranging from Level 1
to Level 5, with Level 5 being the most difficult or the highest skill level. The
survey did show that about half the population performed at levels 3-5 and half
performed within the lower levels 1 and 2.
SERPs and Readability
Nevertheless, if we accept the
various reading level scales like, Flesch-Kincaid, article writers can improve
their content marketing to more closely match the acceptance of targeted
readers. In addition, Google and other search engines may or may not look
favorably on the webpage or article and rank it higher than one that Google
deems to be written at an inappropriate level as evidenced by the Official
Google Blog
For instance, an article written at
the twelfth grade level about building a tool shed may not be looked upon as
worthy of Google's definition of maximizing the user search experience. An
article on the same subject written at the sixth or seventh grade level might
well fair much better in the SERPs.
On the other hand, writing an article
on the Literacy Statistics of Migrant Workers at the fourth or fifth grade
level would not fare well with academic readers and probably not with the
search engines.
The point is that article writers
should consider readability when writing articles.
