Textual Content and Readability
At this moment in time the main content of any Web page is the textual content. There are certainly Web sites having multi-media content as the centerpiece and main attraction. However, the primary way to describe a Web site, index it and present it to the World is via textual content in one form or the other. That is why the written text is very important at this moment in time.
When blogs arrived on the Web's landscape they brought with them more textual content and more words. The search engines rely on words to index Web sites properly. Blogs and search engines are a perfect match, but is there a relationship between the volume of textual content and search engine performance. The data below is from four samples of Web sites and shows a breakdown of textual content, words, text length and readability.
| Textual Content and Reading Ease: Average Values | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Observed Element | Web 2.0 Oriented | Tech News and Blogs | Web Marketing | Prominent SE Position |
| HTML Document Length | 29261.8 | 63416.3 | 23898.4 | 38575.5 |
| Text Content Length | 3630.0 | 15324.3 | 5005.1 | 5852.2 |
| Pure Textual Content | 2531.4 | 11944.6 | 4046.5 | 4395.7 |
| Textual Content Flesch Reading Ease | 38.5 | 38.2 | 30.5 | 31.9 |
| Words in Textual Content: Average Values | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Observed Element | Web 2.0 Oriented | Tech News and Blogs | Web Marketing | Prominent SE Position |
| Words in Text | 647.1 | 2691.5 | 858.4 | 772.6 |
| Meaningful Words in Text | 344.9 | 1384.3 | 442.4 | 417.3 |
| Complex Words in Text | 97.3 | 379.7 | 159.4 | 137.7 |
| Unique Words in Text | 237.4 | 799.2 | 286.2 | 281.4 |
| Meaningless Words in Text | 302.1 | 1307.2 | 418.7 | 355.7 |
| Sentences in Text | 24.4 | 100.8 | 34.5 | 27.1 |
According to the data above blogs with high volume of text and words accordingly are not guaranteed to have favorable search engine positions. There is no relationship in this data between volume of textual content and Web sites' performance within search engine results.
Another interesting point is the reading ease level. Tech news and blogs have higher reading ease, but it might not result in better search engine positioning, but it will definately help users reading news and blogs. Web sites in the Web Marketing category have a combination of text length, words, complex words, meaningful and meaningless words that is very similar to Web sites having prominent positions within search engine results.
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