Yoast SEO – 6 New Norms for WordPress

Everyone, who is into building the websites, is familiar with the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and as well with Yoast SEO introduced by WordPress. As you know, writing quality content for your blog posts is extensively crucial to enable the visitors to lower their bounce rates, it is equally as well important to follow other norms. Now, even after learning about the basics of SEO, most writers aren’t sure whether or not everything is precisely followed. So, WordPress’ Yoast SEO has come up with the idea of detecting certain things that need to be addressed.

Ever heard about readability? Yes, in order to keep your audience stay interested, your readability must be of at least average so that most readers get it what’s written. Linguist Irene Strikkers figured out few points in her descriptive research on what matters the most, if anyone reads the article or blog. This is independent of the type of the subject matter one intends to write. The research was done on some websites that intended to gain audience’s attention. Out of all, just a few were successful (to the point of seriously crashing the server) and others weren’t at all.

It is not just about the spelling and grammar, but the ability to convey the message, that isn’t easy for all the writers. There is a difference between preparing for writing a novel or a story-book, and writing for a webpage. Unlike novel readers who would go to each detail through reading, the webpage’s reader won’t care if the write-up seems messy. The readers get quickly bored and so they first scan a webpage (F-shape pattern) to find out whether it is worth investing their valuable time to read everything. Else they skip it entirely (also known as bounce rates).

Yoast SEO provides some tools in advance to improvise the write-up already being written and copied there, through accurately detecting what’s the problem, where exactly it lies, and measures to combat it. If it is readable then the visitors will likely stay on the same page to read everything in detail.

1. Subheadings – Subheadings are really important for an article or blog in order to give a brief idea of the inside story. The readers go through the subheadings while scanning the whole article. Avoid overdoing it, else it seems messy. The text part following a subheading must not cross 350 words, else the bullet shows red. Words within the range 300 and 350 come under orange bullet. If the whole article or blog does not contain subheadings at all, it shows the red bullet.

2. Paragraphs – You must have noticed several sites that contain longer paragraphs than usual. Few of them even do not have texts of readable size. Isn’t it exhausting? It is therefore very much mandatory to limit the texts to some extent (nearly 150 words each), along with keeping in mind about the texts’ size. The tool helps the user know whether the number of words and characters pass the readability score, with the help of red (in case of over 200 words) or orange (in case of an average of 150 to 200 words) or green (till 150 words) bullets as discussed before.

3. Sentences – It is not recommended to elongate your statements over an average of about 20 words. All readers are not good at understanding English and so their brain processing might take longer than expected duration to decode everything. They are not going to search on the Google for getting the meanings behind, either. It is not a hard-and-fast rule to make each statement within 20 words. Instead, form a few sentences shorter, others longer, to make an average of suggested range.

4. Passive Voice – The passive voices make an average reader difficult to understand about the written content, since these are indirect statements. Depending on the purpose of forming a statement, one cannot entirely avoid passive voice but limit to just 10%. Sometimes, it is the demand of the situation and so in order to not seem too harsh, passive voice could be used. For instance, instead of writing “You have not paid the bill”, it is better to write “The bill has not been paid”.

5. Transition words – These words support the continuity of a statement. Therefore, one could use at least 30% of transition words. For instance, although, nonetheless, etc.

6. Flesch Grade – It basically measures the level of English one writes, which ought to be understood by most readers worldwide. It is great if the author keeps a medium pace of at least 60, which maintains the bullet in green color. The lower the grade gets, it is more easily understood by everyone. Even by 11 year olds! The range between 50 to 60 is considered fine and turns the bullet orange in color, else red if it is even lower than 50.

• A red bullet has 3 penalty points.

• An orange bullet has 2 penalty points

If the overall article scores 7 or more penalties, the overall content is going to show red bullet. If it ranges between 5 and 6, the article gets orange bullet, else green in case of 0, 2, 3 or 4 penalties.

Few more golden rules

• Make sure you use more of “you”, instead of “our clients”, “the customer”, and so on. This has an impression that the author understands the reader as if talking in person. And the reader, in turn, feels more connected.
• Use small words so that the reader does not have a difficult time in getting what you meant.
• Bullets and numbering could be made in two ways:

1. If, in case, you can prove, you –

• were more intelligent;
• sensed her motives; and
• were innocent;

you will be able to prove yourself to the court.

2. He needs to take the following with him:

• A pencil
• A paper
• A pen

The writer won’t be able to recognize whether he/she has written as per the set norms. But they can pay attention so that they need very little efforts to correct. Only a perfect SEO tool detects whether the write-up is worth uploading or not.

Remember that it is just not the Yoast SEO by WordPress which is available but also All in One SEO Pack. If you are in trouble of deciding which is better, you must have a thorough research on these. Both are highly popular and trustworthy, but only using them is going to give you the clear idea.

References

1. How to write in plain English
2. Content analysis: Methodological choices explained