Almost everyone is a writer in some way. Whether you’re crafting copy for a website, working on a paper for a class, or a content marketing professional trying to develop the perfect tweet, Word Counter is a tool that can make your life easier.

A good word counter helps you stay on target with your writing without wasting time trying to guess how much you’ve written by eyeballing it on the screen (or even worse, counting words manually.)

If your writing tools don’t have built in word counters (or you want something a bit more powerful), we’ve got a helpful suggestion for you.

1. Make Sure Google Reads Your Website

When writing for websites, search engines rank quality content much higher than content with less perceived quality. While there are plenty of factors that contribute to overall quality, word count is an important consideration.

Websites, pages and posts with short blocks of content lack authority in the eyes of Google. Text needs to be several hundred words or longer to reach search engines, and with enough of explanation of a topic to seem credible and authoritative.

But there’s a flip side to that equation as well – making a word counter even more important – too much text can turn off readers even if search engines like the content. Fewer clicks from users can result in a downgrading of a page in search.

To optimize content for both users and search, opt for 300 to 1,500 words. If your word count falls in this range, you are on the right track.

2. Write for Human Readers

Everything you write should be for actual readers. While you do need to think about search, writing is meant to be read. These readers want to see text that includes variances in length and style. They want to read copy that is clean, free of errors, and includes engaging information. (Plus, all of these elements help with search as well.)

Use a word counter or grammar tool to ensure that your copy is clean and readable. If you don’t have a proofreader, such a tool can give you an extra check before you show your writing to others.

3. Optimize Posts for Social Media

Each social media platform has an optimal word count that ensures the content you write won’t be cut off or truncated. While some channels such as Facebook do allow longer posts, they get truncated and most readers will never see the writing.

Using a word counter tool can help you optimize each of these bits of micro-writing.

Remember to stick to 250 characters or less for Facebook and 280 characters or less for Twitter. (And yes, a good word counter includes a character count function as well.)

4. Nail Your Assignments

High school students, college students and even professional writers often get assignments that come with very specific constraints on length. From page counts to word counts, you want to ensure that you nail your assignments.

Students know how challenging this can be, particularly with assignments that ask for word or page counts sans spaces or require a certain number of paragraphs.

And bumping up the font size for a paper isn’t a valid trick to get to a certain page count. Word Counter (which we’ll talk about below) even knows how many words is on the average page. (Your teachers and professors will, too.)

Use a word counter that can measure different types of requirements all at once – characters, words, sentences, paragraphs and pages. To keep track of how you are doing as you write, look for a word counting tool that measures everything in real time.

5. Become a More Disciplined Writer

Writing discipline is an important part of becoming a better, stronger writer. Crafting copy that fits within constraints, such as a specific word count, can help you learn to edit yourself and say precisely what you need to.

That discipline also includes using varying sentence and paragraph lengths as well as thinking about how the entire piece of writing comes together. Generally, the parts of writing consist of an introduction, body and conclusion. The body of the writing should be about 75 percent of the total word count, while the intro and conclusion share the remaining percentage.

Need a Tool? Try Word Counter

Word Counter is a web-based tool that can help your writing. Use it to count characters, words, sentence, paragraphs and pages.

What’s great about this tool is that it counts everything in real time. You can past in text from anywhere or type right into the box to see how your copy breaks down. It also includes contextual stats for social media and Google. (You don’t even have to know optimal character count to paste in text and edit it for social media.)

The interface is clean and easy to read and use. There’s no learning curve and any writer can figure out how to use Word Counter in seconds.

Key features of Word Counter include:

• Counts in a contextual manner based on length of text
• Provides word and character counts with and without spaces
• Easy to use interface that works with direct typing or copy and paste
• No limit to the amount of text the tool can count (you can paste the entirety of the Harry Potter series into Word Counter if you like)
• It’s free to use
• Keyword density tool shows most frequently used words and word groups
• Word Counter works in real-time
• The tool won’t remove spaces or formatting so you can actually read text on the screen

Conclusion

A word counter is an important tool for every writer. While some programs such as Microsoft Word include word counters, they don’t always count other parts of the writing, such as pages.

Use Word Counter to solve these common issues and streamline your writing process. You’ll be able to write quicker and know where your copy stands as you do.

Our thanks to Word Counter for sponsoring this post, and helping support Design Shack.