Readability archives

Let’s say you have a website but know little about SEO. But you’ve heard about Yoast SEO, and people have told you it’s a great tool to optimize your site for Google, Bing, Yandex and other search engines. So you install the Yoast SEO plugin. What now? Well, our plugin needs your input to help your …

When it comes to writing, looking at your work objectively can be hard. Of course, most of us can write a few paragraphs on a certain topic. But making sure that your text is entertaining and easy to read is where it gets more challenging. Using too many difficult words, long sentences and not tying …

Crafting clear and correct paragraphs isn’t just about aesthetics. You shouldn’t put whitespace in your content just to make it look nicer. Paragraphs are actually a vital ingredient for readability, for both your readers and Google. So in order to create great content, you’ll need to give your paragraphs some extra SEO love! In this …

No, it’s not writing about nature. It means you write in a way that flows well and sounds natural. As if you were talking to someone. Now, we’re not saying to write slang words and half-finished sentences, because that wouldn’t read very well. So, what is natural writing? Read more to find out! Write like …

Reading from a screen can be difficult, so if you want people to read your whole blog post, it must be easy to understand. This will get you more returning visitors and a higher conversion rate. Luckily, improving the readability of your content is something you can do relatively quickly, to give your site a …

We’ve all been lured into clicking on unsatisfying search results before. At first glance, it looks promising. But if you can’t see what you’re looking for when you get there, you’ll probably just leave again. *Boing* — there goes the bounce rate! The fact is, just making content and getting it into the search results …

We’re always working to improve and refine the Yoast SEO user experience with every release. In this release, we’ve rolled out improvements to our Schema structured data implementation and fixed a couple of bugs. Aside from that, we’ve decided to include some exciting additions to our plugins, starting with a new emoji picker tool and …

The word complexity assessment in Yoast SEO Premium and Yoast SEO for Shopify checks whether a text has too many complex words. But what is a complex word in the first place? How many complex words are too many in a text? What is the scientific reasoning behind this assessment? You’ll find all the answers …

Using the right keywords is essential in SEO. Because using the words your audience searches with will help your posts and pages rank. That’s why we always tell you to put some effort into finding the perfect keywords to optimize your articles for. So, after finding the perfect keyword, why shouldn’t you use it over …

Is it worth your while making your text easy to read? Will it lead to higher rankings and more traffic? In simpler terms: Does readability rank? At Yoast, we’re convinced that writing in plain and understandable language can and will get you more visitors. We’ve even developed a tool to help people write readable text. …