Blog Readability, Text and Words
Blogging is all about the written word. Bloggers writing styles are different. Some blogs are easy to read while others are more difficult to read. Blogs covering specialized topics such as technology or business related issues probably contain text and words that is difficult for young Web users and newcomers to read and understand, but that does mean all those blogs are less readable.
Measuring readability depends on many factors. A blog post text is almost never the only content of the Web page it contains. An easily readable piece of text of a blog post might be less readable if other content such as navigation links and advertisements affect the text and making it difficult for the user to locate the text and read it. The link/ads noise surrounding a piece of text can easily become a main factor of measuring readability.
The data below shows the results of readability tests for the two business blog samples that we are focusing on at this moment. It also shows some breakdown of the number of words, sentences and word complexity for the same samples.
| Reading Ease: Average Index (Higher number means easier to read) | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Observed Element | Business Blogs | Business Blogs SE | Prominent SE Position |
| Textual Content Flesch Reading Ease | 37.5 | 38.1 | 31.9 |
| Title Flesch Reading Ease | 52.6 | 48.2 | 41.4 |
| Meta Desc Flesch Reading Ease | 35.9 | 40.5 | 36.2 |
| Words: Average | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Observed Element | Business Blogs | Business Blogs SE | Prominent SE Position |
| Words in Text | 3987.7 | 2987.6 | 1018.7 |
| Meaningful Words in Text | 2019.5 | 1498.5 | 537.4 |
| Complex Words in Text | 623.8 | 437.1 | 170.9 |
| Unique Words in Text | 1010.1 | 769.5 | 335.7 |
| Meaningless Words in Text | 1968.2 | 1489.1 | 481.6 |
Business blogs true to their nature of being rich in text, but according to the above data they are also more readable than general Web sites having favorable positions within search engine results. However, blogs that may or may not have favorable search engine positions seems to be richer in text than those in favorable positions.
The ratio of unique words is higher in both blog samples. It might be an indicator for both bloggers and Web publishers in general to keep the ratio of unique words vs. total words as high as possible in order to perform better.
Related links:
