Word Count Blog

With the winning march of Google as a search engine over the planet search engine optimization became a milestone activity for many of the corporate webmasters. Lots of companies helping businesses to climb on top of the search emerged in last 10 years.

But with the development of SEO people started to mix 2 essential content parameters — word count and frequency count. It’s pretty strange, since mixing them is like mixing time and distance in the speed formula.

Word count – is the total quantity of meaningful words (excluding tags) in the piece of text.

Frequency count – is the index of how many times a word or a phrase appears in the in the piece of text.

You can find an example of a classic frequency counter here and a word count tool here.

From the first look you may think that frequency counter outbeats word count software in functionality, because it counts both words and statistics. But if you put a tagged text into a frequency count tool you will disappointed to find that all the tags were also included into the word and frequency count.

So if you need to count the quantity of the meaningful words (excluding all the tags) to know the volume of the job done in the majority of the text and even graphics formats, you need a word count tool. However if you are writing a SEO optimized content and want to know, whether you have put enough keywords into it, you’ll need a frequency count web app.

I work in the same company with Dmitry Chaplay, chief developer of a word count software called AnyCount. Recently Dmitry and the R&D team released AnyCount 7.0 and made a kind of breakthrough in the word count experience by introducing the word count for image files (BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG).

This is a piece of remarkable industry news, since guys are the first, who put OCR feature into a word count tool. So I took my favorite mug and went to Starport (so we call AIT’s R&D center) for a coffee with Dmitry.

T: Dima, what’s the idea lies behind the AnyCount?

D: It’s pretty simple and obvious – just customizable word, character or line count.

T: And nothing more?

D: And did you expect a text editor in the word count software? Multipurpose tools show average performance in a big variety of fields, but provide extensive functionality only for 1 or 2 tasks. Look at the MS Word – it is a cool text editor, but when it comes to the word count statistics AnyCount provides a more accurate one.

T: AIT developers were the first ones, who introduced word count in the image files (BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG). Was that a kind of strategic vision from the marketing point of view?

D: No, actually it is already a need. Our support department gets a pile of requests from translation agencies like this: “We’ve got a scanned contract, how can we count the word statistics to quote the client?” So we acquired an OCR engine, optimized it and incorporated into AnyCount.

T: Must be easy only to say, but in fact there is a big deal of real work behind it Some days ago I tried out a free word count in graphic files and had my result for free without paying a penny. So what do people pay for with OCR in AnyCount?

D: Hm, if I tell you that they pay for the comfort you won’t believe, huh?

T: Me? Definitely not

D: Actually our OCR solution support 20+ languages and the most of free tools go only with 7 of them (like English, Spanish, Portuguese, where the rest 4 vary from tool to tool). So your method of free OCR won’t work in the Cyrillic languages.

T: You almost made me believe that comfort matters But what about the future? You know, a successful product always needs to be two steps ahead of user expectations. Do you already have any ideas of improving AnyCount?

D: We have just released a major update It’s not that just “bang! Idea now – a new feature tomorrow”. We need to analyze the user’s requests, target the new test formats. But I promise that as soon as we find something worth improvement, we’ll bring it to the life.

The dinner break was almost over so I had to run back to Babylon (AIT translation division office) and go back to my PM’s duties. Stay in touch - more word count tips and news are on their way.

There is a number of people in the world who are paid basing on the how many words of content they produce per day. Let’s have a look at the list of professions where people would typically need a word count software to get their wages accurately.

1. Translators. All folks that are related to the translation process are word count gurus — trimming actual word count means either saving some budget or squeezing more profit. However localizers use not the pure word count, but “weighted word count” that is closely integrated with the translation memory tools.

2. Medical transcriptors. MTs have to digitize manually written or tape-written medical data. The main specific of this profession is that one has to listen and type at the same time. But a skilled medical transcriptionist is a valued worker who usually get their salary basing on the word count.

3. Commercial bloggers. These guys “blog for fun and profit”. Their task is keeping a corporate, news or whatsoever blog popular (i.e. filled with interesting content). They are paid per word of the generated content — pure word counters.

4. Freelance journalists. They are very much like commercial bloggers, but they sell their content to the “real media” (unlike of commercial bloggers they know nothing of SEO). Sometimes they are paid basing on the actual word count, but is most cases their wages are based on estimates (more details here).

5. Writers. Yes, the folks who write big books that are printed on white paper, which you can buy at Barnes & Noble. Of course there are less successful guys whose books you are hardly to find even digging all day long at Amazon. But both successful and not very successful ones are paid on the word count basis (more info on the topic you can find in the History of Word Count Metrics).

If you know any other profession, where people are paid on a per word, per character or per line basis, leave you comment and it will be included into the update to this article