WordPress recently integrated AIOSEO into its blogging back-end.
AIOSEO is, as you might have already guessed, a little programme which analyses a blog post and provides an SEO score.
There are two main scores: one for the title and one for the body of the post...
It's a useful tool overall but I can't help feeling it's encouraging me to dumb down my content!
First off you get a basic score for the title....
This is broken down into common/ uncommon/ emotional and power words. You're supposed to aim for a balance...
You don't get hints on what these might be with the free AIOSEO version but I think with the pro version you get advice.
Presumably there are some other word categories besides the above as clearly I can't have just '29% of words' in the title!
I'm not sure what "Power Words" are, something for me to explore, but I guess if you're writing to a niche audience you are limited in which ones of these you can use!
This is is all the basics - linking, pictures, basic content and meta description...
I need to brush up on what the meta description is - it's off in every post but I can't seem to track it down!
This is the bit I'm most sceptical about...
After a basic check for pictures (fair enough) we get into sentence length. I can't believed that sentences over 20 words long are too difficult to read, but then again I do write for an semi-academic audience.
I can't help but remember The Sun is written so a 10 year old can understand it because that's the reading age of many adults, I guess the same applies here!
Everything else makes sense.. Passive Voice is something I do way too much, I learned something - I need to use the active more!
And Flesch reading ease... not sure what that is, but I guess it's a combination of sentence and paragraph length, so if you have everything else you'll have this covered more than likely!
Overall this is a useful tool which I think will help me improve my writing and reach more people.
But I will be taking a few things with a pinch of salt, such as the sentence length and word use in titles - one has to keep one's target audience in mind and not flex too much I think!
And I've got a hellluva load of updating to do!
