How to improve your readability using Yoast SEO | SEO for beginners

The readability of your posts is a key factorfor a holistic SEO strategy.

We've already told you about holistic SEO and how important it isthat you write quality content.

Quality content of course needs to beoriginal and relevant to your readers, but it should also be easy to read.

Let me first tell you what we mean whenwe talk about content that's easy to read.

I'll then explain why readable contentis extremely important.

So what makes a text readable? First of all, a readable text is a textthat is well structured.

It should have an introduction, a body in which you convey your message, and a conclusion.

Within this bigger structure, the text needs to be divided up further into paragraphs that reflect your ideasand arguments.

These paragraphs need to be precededby subheadings that clearly state the contentof each paragraph.

Furthermore, make sure to start eachparagraph with a topic sentence.

The topic sentence is the most importantsentence of that paragraph.

It will give the reader an ideaof what the whole paragraph is about.

All following sentences in the paragraphwill then elaborate on that topic sentence.

In addition to these structural elementsof your text, you also should consider stylistic elements.

Your text should be pleasant to read.

So whether it comes to your choiceof words or sentence structures, go for short and clearrather than long and convoluted.

Write sentences that are not too long andwhich are clearly marked by transition words.

Transition words are words such as”in contrast”, “additionally”, or “therefore”.

These words give your readers directionwhen reading your text.

Finally, don't go overboardwith complicated terminology.

Don't stuff your sentences with long, hard to read words when you can also use simpler wordsto achieve the same effect.

So as you can see, text structure and style are things that you need to think abouton multiple levels of your text.

But why is it that readability is so importantfor your SEO strategy? Well, most importantly, you really wantto focus on your audience and their reading experience.

You want to write an article that iswell structured and pleasant to read.

You want your readers to understandthe message of your post quickly and without too much effort.

That way, you will not only entice readers to click through from the search resultsto your website, but they'll also be more likelyto stay on your website.

Making a text more readable is not aboutdumbing down your content.

It's about making your postsas accessible as possible.

It's about avoiding unnecessary complexityin your writing.

You can still tackle complex issuesin your posts, but it's part of the writer's job – your job -to break down complex ideas and make them clearand easy to understand.

Additionally, it's importantthat your text is scannable.

For this, think aboutyour own reading behavior on the web.

When you look up something on Google, you'll probably open a couple of the pagesthat come up and quickly scan themto get a general idea of your search results.

So you really want to be ableto see at a glance what a text is about.

Splitting up a text into paragraphsthat are preceded by subheadings makes it easy for your readers to decide whether or not they would like to readyour article, or which parts they want to read.

The same goes for topic sentences.

People tend to read the first sentenceof every new paragraph as they're scanning through the text.

So make sure to incorporate these elements to make your contenteasily scannable for your readers.

And then there's alsoGoogle's ranking algorithm to consider.

Google is becoming smarter and smarterin how it evaluates websites.

To determine the topic of a page, it will make use of some of the same factorsthat human readers use.

For example, it will pay attentionto the headings and subheadings to determine the topic of a page.

Similarly, voice search is becomingmore and more important.

When you use voice search on your phoneor on Google Home for example, you might get a spoken resultfor your search term.

In that case you don't want to have to listento extremely long sentences.

If clarity is important when reading a text, it's even more importantin order to grasp a spoken message.

I hope that I've been able to convince you that it's crucial to write textsthat are easily readable.

Readability really ranks.

That's why we've addeda readability analysis in our plugin.

This analysis consistsof various assessments that will check the structure of your text as well as various elementsof your writing style.

We give you feedback with green, red, and orange bullet points that will point you to the areas of your textthat could still use some improvement.

That way, you can be sureyou've got all the important points covered when it comes to the readabilityof your text.

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