rates the text on a 100-point scale. The higher the score, the easier it is to understand the document. Authors are encouraged to aim for a score of approximately 60 to 70.

The second, Flesch-Kincaid Grade level, is “a rough measure of how many years of schooling it would take someone to understand the content”.

Very well I thought, and ran this tool against this blog. This is what it gave me as a result:

OK this is all very interesting, and the figures they give on their site as an example are Fog Index of 8 for Reader’s Digest and 8 to 10 for most popular novels, so looks like my blog must be pretty readable, but what does it have to do with our particular industry? Of course, we in SEO / SEM should look not only at keywords and rankings but also at how it all can convert. And for something to convert, it should be comprehensible for your target audience. So I thought I’d run this sample analysis against a few other SEO blogs. This is what I got:

Aaron Wall’s SEOBook.com:

Rand Fishkin’s SEOMoz:

Matt Cutts’ blog:

Jim Boykin’s blog:

Pretty interesting to compare these things, isn’t it? I could go on for ages, but the purspose was just to show what it’s all about. The tool doesn’t give you plain answers of course, this is just factual data so you still need ot use your head to figure out how it can be applied best and what conclusions should be drawn out of this kind of analysis. However, I can see how this can be used when comparing your site to competitors’ in any industry, and maybe this is just the factor that might help a site convert better…

Whatever it is you write, it has either a long term value (e.g. site content) or short term value (e.g. a press release), though sometimes something that was originally meant to serve as material to attract short term attention can end up serving you long term (e.g. syndicated articles).

1. Finding stuff to write about and researching the topic’s popularity (most important for effective exposure of short term value content like press releases):
1. what do people talk about currently? – to find out, you can use:

i. Bloglines – create an account, subscribe to blogs posting on your topic of interest – this is good for both short term and long term value content writing, in the meantime you can subscribe to your own blogs to create extra exposure for them

ii. Technorati – tags by popularity

iii. Feedster

iv. PubSub – subscriptions to searches on certain terms – the info is updated as new posts matching the query are found, sample subscriptions are available

v. Furl: latest headlines, most popular

vi. Free Press Release site – for ideas what to write about for immediate publication (long term as well)

vii. Google news – the latest news at a glance, can be researched in depth for a certain specific topic

viii. Google Blog Search – what’s been posted recently on a certain topic – when sorted by date, shows what’s hot short term, when sorted by relevance can be used for long term material research

ix. Yahoo News – same idea as Google News

x. Yahoo News Search – searches news and blogs, search results can be sorted by date

xi. Wikipedia’s main page – they display a featured article as well as current news. Both can give you an idea of what to write about both short term and long term.

xii. Blogpulse – Top news stories, Top Blogs, Top Blog Posts, key phrases

2. Watch what your competitors do (e.g. at i-newswire.com or any other press release site, search for your competitors’ site URL and look through their press releases) – but instead of simply copying them, critically analyze their activities and try to make your work better by using and improving their good ideas and avoiding their mistakes.
   
   
2. Link bait concept – think what people will be interested in and likely to link to. Not necessarily something positive – negative reaction is good too for linking (see this article by Rob Sullivan on types of linkbait)
   Keep in mind, however, that in some cases negative stuff for link bait might not be a good idea – if it undermines the site’s reputation in the potential customers’ eyes, for example.
3. How not to write: www.clickhereyouidiot.com (the ideology of sales letters and what’s wrong with it when driven to the edge – got this one from a Threadwatch post by Aaron Wall)
   Consider an article title like this: Unimaginable Power Of [Our Product/Service]- Most Sacred Secretes Of [Whatever It Is We Offer] Revealed - what’s wrong about it? Well, everybody smells an exaggeration and hype before they even start reading your stuff.
4. Checking visitor logs for topics to write about – this concerns sites/blogs rather than articles/press releases but still can give you an idea
5. Checking rankings – are there any unusual terms the site ranks for? If they are still somehow related to the site’s topic they might be worth covering/expanding (tools: data.rankcount.com, googspy.com – thanks Aaron for these two links as well)