My name is Belinda. I am an SEO copywriter and I’m addicted to Wordle.
What’s a Wordle I hear you ask? Wordle is a free online application that generates word clouds from any text, blog or RSS feed you provide. A word cloud is a graphical representation of your text, like the one attached to this post. The words that appear most frequently are bigger and more prominent in the cloud. It’s pretty cool.
So why am I so obsessed with a little visual representation of my copywriting?
I first discovered Wordle when I was learning about this thing called SEO copywriting and it’s a tool I’ve never stopped using.
How does it work?
When you paste text into Wordle you can instantly see which words are being referenced the most often. As an SEO copywriter, that’s exactly what I need to ascertain. Search engines aren’t that clever and they rely on certain signals to work out what your online content is about.
One of these signals is the most frequently used words on the webpage.
So, if you are trying to write some web copy that is optimised for a specific word or phrase, plug it into Wordle and you’ll instantly see how close you are. If you need to, you can go back to your copy and look for ways to fit your keyword in. I plugged this post in and this is what it came back with ….
Now I’m sure there are ways I could optimise this blog post a bit more, but I’m pretty happy with that. It’s important to remember that mindless keyword stuffing isn’t what you’re aiming for.
You need to write copy for a human. After all, it’s not the search engines that hand over their credit card.
Now I have revealed my addiction, it’s over to you. Do you already use Wordle? How do you find it?
Let me know I’m not alone!
Belinda
11 Responses
Totally, Belinda! I use Wordle to tweak text for clients’ websites so that I squeeze as much SEO goodness in there as possible, without it reading unnaturally. There’s always such a fine line. I also like to show clients illustrations that help them to easily understand the difference between the ‘before’ version of their text (that they’ve written) and the ‘after’ version (when I’ve rewritten it). It’s all well and good to say that I can improve the quality of the web copy and provide value for the invoice they receive, but to actually show them … well, a picture speaks a thousand key words ;).
Gina.
Thanks for your comment Gina. I just love your idea of a before and after image of the website copy and I hope you don’t mind if I steal that one!
No problem, Belinda, you’re very welcome! 🙂
I just LOVE Wordle… I’ve used it for blog posts, although I have to admit I also love just clicking the random button and checking out the colourful images..!
This is brilliant. It has added another dimension to what I can provide clients. I totally agree with the copy needing to be human, but making sure it has the right focal points for google is icing on the cake.
Another gem Belinda! Well done.
I’m so pleased to have introduced Wordle to someone new Belinda! It’s easy to become addicted though.. but when you are, you’ll be in a great club!
Great article! I recently discovered Tagxedo (http://www.tagxedo.com) which is a step above Wordle (can handle shapes). Maybe a bit complicated for beginners but the graphics are awesome and worth checking out!
Thanks for leaving the link John. I’ll check it out!
I LOVE this! Have seen these around and thought somebody had painstakingly created them in photoshop – whoops! Can you download and save them at all? I’m checking all my blog posts now but can’t see how to privately save them.