The optimization section of the Review tab on a story provides valuable data and insights to marketing managers and managing editors to help increase the odds of their content being discovered by and appeal to the right audience. 

This is the approximate time a reader will need to read the full story. Reading time is calculated using a formula with some standard assumptions such as length of the article in number of words, number of images etc.

The ideal reading time will depend on a publication's needs and there's no good or bad number. Typically conveying the full idea in a short amount of time is always desirable. 

This is a useful piece of information as you plan to distribute when optimizing your story for search engines. Different search engines have different headline requirements and it's a good practice to use headlines that will not be truncated. For example, Google truncates headlines after 57 characters. 

Note: This is only true if your piece's headline will be part of the title tag which a lot of publications do. 

This section gives you information on how relevant your headline is to the body of your story. It's important to have headlines that are relevant to your piece to ensure that you're providing quality experience to your readers and they don't feel duped. Search engines frown on articles that have headlines that can be misleading and entice users to click, but may not have much in common with the rest of the story. 

This section will tell you where the relevancy of your headlines fall when compared to every other article in Contently. While it's hard to establish a correlation between actual relevancy and content performance, giving you a sense of where your article falls on the spectrum of articles being produced in Contently should give you an idea if it needs revising. 

This section will be of interest to editors and marketers who are responsible for SEO. Given that search optimization is one of the most important things for content marketers, you should be optimizing every article for a certain keyword or phrase. 

In order to ensure proper optimization, it's important to know if it's used in the piece. The SEO keyword section points out if the keyword (or phrase) was used in the headline. We also let the user know how many times it was used in the body of the article. 

The tool will flag if it finds that the keyword or phrase is missing from either the headline or the body. This way they can make a decision on a case by case basis to ensure their articles are fully optimized. The tool doesn't flag if there is excessive usage primarily because search engines don't have an official limit for keyword use. Experienced search engine marketers and editors should be wary of that and make sure that the usage doesn't seem unnatural. 

Using an Alt text is a great practice to making sure your content is accessible to everyone. Alt text is what's displayed when the browser can't render your image. It's also required in browsers made for those who are visually impaired. So it's really important to provide some text that's contextual to the image being used. 

In order to add an alt text, select the image in question, and click on the "Edit" button that shows up. Alt text is the very first field.

If you have any additional questions about optimizing your content, please reach out to your Customer Success lead.