I spend quite a lot of my writing time providing web content for various clients. This involves writing for SEO (search engine optimisation) purposes, which means, amongst other things, you need to weave keywords or phrases seamlessly into the text. The idea is that both search engines and humans will find meaning in the words.
Whilst I’ve found Scrivener invaluable over the last few months I’ve been using it for both fiction and articles, I’ve only just realised what a help it is when it comes to SEO.
Scrivener is the most magical of writing apps. I can’t imagine how I used to keep things organised before I found it.
For nonfiction writing, it’s just so easy to keep everything together, labelled either by subject area or client, and in the corkboard view I can see at a glance the content of each separate piece. A big help when you’re trying not to repeat yourself!
But back to SEO and how it helps with that. The key trick is in repeating the words and phrases you want the search engine to focus on. Not so much that it sounds silly, but just enough to throw a definite spotlight on the subject matter.
Scrivener has a neat little trick up it’s sleeve that helps with this.
Under View/Statistics/Text Statistics (or ^⌥⌘S) there’s an option for Word Frequency. Clicking on it reveals all the words in the document along with how many times that word’s been used. What this means is that if you’re after a word density of, say, 5%, and your document is 500 words long, you need a word frequency of 5 alongside your target word. Any less than that and you know you need to go back and add some stealthy repetitions in. Any more than that, and providing it still doesn’t sound like it was intended for four-year-olds learning to read, and you’re onto a winner.
Ideally you want the keywords to be evenly spaced all through the body of the article. It’s no good at all repeating your SEO targeted word/phrase ten times in the first paragraph then leaving it out of the rest.
Scrivener helps here too, via its search facility.
In the little search box at the top of the screen, just type in the word you want it to look for, and it will highlight every instance of that word in the document. You can see at a glance where the targeted words appear and through this visual pattern you’ll immediately see if you’ve got the spacing about right.
Of course, with short 500 word blog posts, the search option is enough to show me my word density. Where the text statistics score over a simple search is in the added information it gives me. For example, in this article I’m mostly targeting the words Scrivener and SEO, but in text statistics/word frequency I can quickly see if I’ve inadvertently targeted other words too. Search engines are pretty clever, but they’re not clever enough to deduce intended meaning from accidental meaning. So if I’ve got the same number of repetitions of a different word the search engine might lay the emphasis on that instead and return a search result I didn’t intend.
Clever Scrivener.
