Good Content Words

Content words, in linguistic terms, words with nominal or indeterminable meaning, that contribute to the meaning of a word, regardless of their grammatical position, and therefore have a bearing on the meaning of a sentence as a whole. The whole meaning of a sentence can be deduced from the elements that make it up. These elements are known as content words. One of the biggest problems students and non-teachers alike have when it comes to content words is that the meanings of many of them are not clear at first glance. That's why most grammar books will offer lists, for easy reference, of the "big" and "little" content words. These may be called such, because they carry some implied meaning that makes them part of a bigger, or a "bigger" idea. For example, the word "be", used to mean "beg", and "have" to mean "to have" (as in "he's been stealing my work"). Or the word "sleep" used to mean "to relax" and "while awake" (as in "you should sleep out of your window"). So once you know the content words that make up the rest of a sentence, you can immediately spot their differences from the parts that make them obvious. But how do you know what content words to use? This is where Google's new automated tools can be helpful. Google recently introduced a site called "Mercer". This site ranks hundreds of English Wikipedia entries, according to their "quality score", as well as other content websites (not just Wikipedia). It takes into account both how frequently the content is used and its placement in the text. After plugging in a number of keywords, you'll see a list of all the words (both keyword phrases and entire articles) that fit into the area given by" Mercer". You can then choose to filter out the words that don't fit, or choose to add more of them. Choose the type of content you want, from categories such as "encyclopedia" and "entirely irrelevant", and the rate they are used by other users. Then plug in a number of other content words per month. See which articles are most used in content searches (based on their quality score and location in the text) and see which ones are best used as content words per articles. Most tools also allow you to choose to filter out everything except the most relevant keywords. This gives you more flexibility, since you can eliminate content that doesn't help your ranking or that doesn't have good search engine placement. There's even one dedicated tool for scraping article texts for keyphrases. The main thing here is to try and get as many content words per article into the top rankings as possible. The higher up in the rankings an article is, the more likely people will click on it. But many articles are simply too long. Articles with ten or twenty sentences are frowned upon and generally perceived as a useless waste of time. An article with only two or three hundred words will also not be preferred, since it takes longer to read. So aim for one hundred to five hundred word articles, but don't worry too much about keyword density, since it isn't going to make much of a difference in the rankings. It is a good idea to focus on one to two hundred unique keywords per article. Doing this not only makes it far easier for people to find your articles, but also means that you are far less likely to end up with duplicate content. If you write five articles, then only half of one of them will have any use to a potential reader. That is far less likely to happen if you wrote five hundred articles, where at least some of them will be useful. And having duplicate content is one of the main reasons why Google penalizes you. Finally, make sure you submit your articles to directories. It can take several days or even weeks before your article gets listed, so ensure that you are submitting your articles to as many directories as possible. At the same time, ensure that the directory you are submitting to have a high page rank. These directories should have a readership of around a few hundred, ideally a thousand. This means that they are well established and receive a lot of traffic, which Google uses to determine where it ranks within its search engine.