Improve Your Writing with the Textalyser Keyword Tool

It's Not Just for Keyword Counting

M. M. Lyons' article on keywords had an interesting way to explain keywords: "The powers that pay are looking for you to generate traffic to the site so that they can make their income, and thereby pay you yours. Keyword density is your literary call girl. Textalyser wants to be your madam." I seldom check keyword density because I've been working my business long enough that I have no need for a madam to tell me whether my keywords are working their business or not. But Textalyser does more than calculate keyword density. Look at the information you have to scroll past to get to the keywords:

Number of words:
Number of different words:
Complexity factor (Lexical Density):
Readability (Gunning-Fog Index): (6-easy 20-hard)
Average Syllables per Word :
Sentence count:
Average sentence length (words):
Max sentence length (words):
Min sentence length (words):

The three calculations I put in bold text might help you improve your writing. They are not, of themselves, measures of quality. However, high-quality writing seldom falls too far outside these parameters.

Complexity factor (Lexical Density [LD]) = (Number of different words / Total number of words) x 100

A score of 40-60 is average. A high score indicates that you seldom repeat words. A low score indicates that you are repeating many words. Whether this is good or bad depends on your purpose and audience.

Texts with a lower lexical density are more easily understood because they use the same word for the same concept wherever it appears. Red is red, not red, crimson, vermilion and scarlet. Overviews and roundups tend to score high, but so do rambling rants about the meaning of life and the injustices it inflicts on you. Children's books and writing meant for non-native speakers tends to have low scores.

If your writing scores above 60 or below 40, take a second look at it. Read it out loud to make sure it sounds OK. Make sure you aren't bringing in synonyms just because your English teacher said you should. Make sure you aren't mindlessly repeating keywords where you would normally use a referential pronoun such as "it" or "he" or a generic word like "auto".