Meaningful Words in Web Page Content
A meaningful word is a concept that we commonly use when exploring the Web sites that we study. What is a meaningful word in the context of Web page content optimization?
In our case, the answer is very simple. We define meaningful word such that it is of size 3 characters or more, is not a stop word or unwanted by a definition, and does not have a general meaning such as "Web, home and index".
The tables show data on the length of text and the number of words in Web page content obtained from two large samples.
| Text Length and Words in Textual Content: General | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Observed Element | Observed Category | % Found | Average | Min | Max | Median | 80 Percentile Range | |
| Text Content Length | General | 100.00 | 8,211.51 | 224.00 | 54,573.00 | 7,978.00 | 1,973.72 - 17,166.33 | |
| Words in Text Content | General | 100.00 | 1,431.65 | 44.33 | 9,662.83 | 1,374.50 | 353.65 - 2,872.00 | |
| Meaningful Words in Text Content | General | 100.00 | 761.67 | 18.50 | 4,677.17 | 700.17 | 186.97 - 1,560.28 | |
| Text Length and Words in Textual Content: Prominent SE Position | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Observed Element | Observed Category | % Found | Average | Min | Max | Median | 80 Percentile Range | |
| Text Content Length | Prominent SE Position | 100.00 | 4,519.99 | 133.43 | 25,342.00 | 4,970.86 | 928.81 - 9,266.67 | |
| Words in Text Content | Prominent SE Position | 99.74 | 785.38 | 29.71 | 4,105.43 | 904.86 | 167.40 - 1,596.79 | |
| Meaningful Words in text Content | Prominent SE Position | 99.74 | 422.78 | 10.86 | 2,501.71 | 422.29 | 87.27 - 891.43 | |
The chart shows that length of text and the number of words on Web pages in prominent search engine positions are on average less than on Web pages in the general category. This data suggests that long text does not necessarily deliver better search engine positioning.
According to this data, meaningful words are approximately 53% of words in textual content and overall the average length of a word is 5.7 characters.
