Free Online Tools To Check The Quality Of Your Content

Making money from a blog used to be as easy as just setting the blog and writing away, however as blogging has become more popular it has become far more difficult to make money blogging. In order to make money a blog needs readers, and with so many blogs to choose from covering virtually every topic imaginable, attracting readers has become far more difficult.
Blog readers have become more difficult to please as the selection of blogs for them to visit has grown, and if they don’t like what they see when they visit a blog for the first time, they are unlikely to visit again.
One of the main ways to attract readers, and convert accidental visitors into regular readers, is to ensure that the blog’s content is of the highest quality. This means that each blog post should be helpful, informative and enjoyable to read. Creating quality content will ultimately lead to natural linking from other websites and natural sharing on social websites, which will help to improve the blog’s authority in the search engines, as well as attracting new readers directly. While this is far easier said than done, there are some online tools which can be used to check the quality of your blog’s content.

Duplicate Content Checkers

One of the major updates which Google have made over the last couple of years is to penalise sites which have duplicate content. Because of this, uniquely written content is essential to a blog’s search engine rankings. While any blogger should always be writing their content rather than copying and pasting text from anywhere, it is worth using an online tool to check the blog for any duplicate content, to avoid potential penalties. Copyscape is generally recognised as the best tool for checking duplicate content; they offer premium accounts, but for most bloggers using their free service will be fine, as this allows you to enter the URL of any of your posts and check for any copies. If Copyscape does return any copies of any of your blog posts then these can be reviewed; if you are writing your own content and Copyscape finds any copies then the chances are someone else has copied the content from your blog.

Spelling and Grammar Checkers

Poor spelling or grammar can quickly distract a reader and in the cases of very poor grammar can even lead to them leaving the blog without reading the rest of article, so ensuring that your blog’s content has excellent spelling and grammar is essential. As blogging has become more popular, the number of bloggers who are writing in English despite it not being their native English has increased dramatically; many of these blogs have poor grammar and spelling. There are a number of websites and programs which can check an article’s spelling and grammar, and usually make suggestions to help the user to correct the mistake. Most spelling mistakes are glossed over by the reader – studies have shown that the human brain automatically corrects most of the spelling errors without the person even realising that there was a mistake – however serious grammatical errors can force the reader to have to go back and read the sentence again, which disrupts the flow of the article. Even the best writers can make mistakes, and spelling and grammar checking tools can help writers to identify and resolve any issues with their article before publishing.

SEO Rating Scripts

Optimising an article for search engines is very important in order to attract natural traffic, so checking SEO factors such as keyword density is often considered to be an essential part of content creation. While this can be checked manually, there are online scripts and WordPress plugins which will analyse the content and return an SEO score, as well as offering suggestions to optimise the article further. Some bloggers will simply not publish an article until it reaches a certain score to improve the chances of their article ranking highly in the search engines.
While these scripts can be useful to get an idea of how the search engines might rank your content, it is important to remember that in the long run well written content will always be better for your site than search engine optimised content, so amending your article to try to get a better score is not recommended. Google’s search engine algorithm is constantly changing, so the factors which led to a page ranking well one month could be completely different the following month; however, readers will always favour well written, informative articles.

Analytical Tools

Often overlooked are the site’s visitors. If the visitors don’t like the content then it should be reviewed to check where the issues are – do any parts of it not make sense, or does the text not flow correctly? The content can then be amended, or in extreme cases removed from the website altogether.
To analyse whether your visitors like your content, you should check for any comments. If the number of comments being left is a lot lower than other articles on your site then this is often – but not always – a good indication that people are not interested in it. Another way to check whether the content is popular with your visitors is to check the time which visitors are staying on the page, which can be checked using analytical scripts and plugins. If people are leaving the page quickly then this usually means they’re not interested in what you’re writing about.
Writing for blogs can be hard work, and many bloggers take the easy route of writing quick articles just to fill up space and make their blog appear more popular, however readers generally appreciate fewer high quality articles to read rather than a high number of articles which don’t really tell them anything.