Writing articles is an excellent way to boost your search engine position. (For additional information on article writing as a SEO strategy, see my class Using eMarketing to Grow your Business.)
Whether you submit your articles to print or online publishers, a publisher will usually give you a word count limit.
Here are a couple of ways to count the number of words in your document.
The traditional way.
Go to your Tools Menu, and click on WordCount.
This works great, however, wouldn't it be more helpful to have that word count right in your document, so you could easily see it as you're working on the document?
Here's another way to update your word count, frankly, it's the method I prefer.
Click the Insert menu, and choose Field.
When the dialog box pops up, select the NUMWORDS code. This box shows the MS Word 2003 version, Word 2000 is slightly different.
This pops a field into your document that shows the number of words in your document.
Here's the key to making this work -- make sure the code is at the bottom of your document. You'll soon see why this is important.
Whenever you want to update the number of words in your document, put your cursor anywhere in the field and hit F9. Since the NUMWORDS field is the last item in your document, you're always only a couple of keystrokes away.
