Article writing is one the best ways to raise your search engine presence. Writing and publishing quality articles allows search engines to know what you have to offer. It can also keep a steady stream of traffic coming to your website, eager to read the content that you have published. With that in mind, it is important to provide high quality content.
A few years ago, it was easy to get traffic from writing articles. All you needed to do was strategically place keywords throughout your article and let Google do the rest. It didn’t matter if you used poor grammar, had spelling errors, or the content wasn’t useful. Search engines would still rank the content high. However, thanks to Google and other search engine algorithms that have been improved over the years to remove crap content from search engine results, the “cream” is rising to the top.
The only way to ensure that you will receive traffic is to write the highest quality content. One way to do this is to use available online tools to assist in quality checking your content. Here are a few I use on a regular basis to ensure my clients receive the highest quality articles.
Readability score:
Readability is important. If people have a difficult time reading your articles, chances are they are going to leave your site immediately. Readability is judged based on the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Scale. This scale scores the readability of your content and ranks it on a scale between 0 and 100. The higher the score, the easier your content is to read.
There are many online tools that allow you to check the readability of your content. Personally, I prefer to use readability-score.com. Simply copy and paste your content and it will return the article’s readability on the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Scale. Once you know your score, you can adjust the content accordingly until you reach the score most suitable for the audience you are targeting.
Grammar checker:
Grammar is important to readability as well as quality. Poor grammar can kill your content, and it only takes a single incident to destroy an otherwise well written article. There are tons of grammar checkers out there, but I prefer Grammarly. The tool helps with more than just grammar. It checks your article for spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, word choice (and word order), passive voice use, and more.
Plagiarism checker:
Plagiarism is a serious matter. In addition to violating copyright law, you will be posting duplicate content which Google will discredit. It could also lead to the article being de-indexed from search results which will be the same as if you never wrote the article in the first place.
While you may not have intended to use the words of someone else, it is always possible that you write something you remember subconsciously. Checking with a plagiarism tools like Copyscape can help you avoid using duplicate content.
There are dozens of tools available to writers in order to check the quality of their writing. The previous are just three that I use for all articles I write. Search around and make a list of the tools you want to use and make a habit of continuously improving the