As I was watching President Obama's inaugural address today, I noticed the speech was filled with metaphors and sounded a lot like a poem and less like anything comprehensible to the average American. I started noticing several phrases or words that were repeated numerous times in the speech. After finding an online transcript of his speech I decided to run a keyword density report on it using Firefox's SEO Quake addon.
The first word I noticed Obama used a lot was "we". After doing a count on "we" Obama officially said it 62 times. I believe this was the most used word in his entire speech. After doing a word count and finding he used 2,403 words, I found that the word "we" appeared 2.5% of the time. Not too shabby. I should note that for some reason SEO Quake failed to report "we". I suspect it automatically filters out commons words like "the", "is" etc.
SEO Quake's Keyword Density Report For President Obama's Inaugural Address
Out of curiosity I ran SEO Quake's keyword density report on his transcript. SEO Quake is a tool that search engine optimizers use to determine how often a phrase appears on a web page in hopes that the page will appear higher in Google's search results because the phrase is used more often. SEO Quake will give phrases for 1, 2, 3 and 4 word phrases in an HTML page. Here is what I found:
| Keyword | Repeats | Density |
|---|---|---|
| nation | 12 | 0.50% |
| new | 11 | 0.46% |
| america | 9 | 0.37% |
| today | 7 | 0.29% |
| people | 7 | 0.29% |
| less | 7 | 0.29% |
| world | 7 | 0.29% |
| let | 7 | 0.29% |
| time | 6 | 0.25% |
| work | 6 | 0.25% |
| Keyword | Repeats | Density |
|---|---|---|
| a new | 7 | 0.58% |
| our nation | 5 | 0.42% |
| the world | 5 | 0.42% |
| no less | 4 | 0.33% |
| men and | 4 | 0.33% |
| and women | 4 | 0.33% |
| our common | 4 | 0.33% |
| of peace | 3 | 0.25% |
| the people | 3 | 0.25% |
| that america | 3 | 0.25% |
Click to view the full SEO Quake Keyword Density Report
Conclusions?
I'm not sure if I have any conclusions to draw from this other than perhaps how much fun SEO Quake's tool is on things not SEO related. I'm sure President Obama could have used the tool beforehand to see if he is getting the right message across in his speech or not. One could also use the tool to see if they are keeping their language fresh and not tirelessly repeating the same words over and over again.
