Lunch Lecture Yoast

Enjoy free lunch while listening to a lunch lecture by Yoast!

Yoast SEO’s readability analysis: Better content for people and search engines alike

Hanna Worku, Marina Koleva, and Martijn van der Klis.

Summary
In search engine optimization (SEO), the goal is to achieve better visibility on the result pages of search engines like Google. Yoast SEO, a plugin for the content management systems WordPress and Shopify, helps websites improve their SEO so they can attract more visitors.
A crucial aspect of SEO is how accessible and easy to read the content of a site is – in other words, its readability. Well-written copy improves the user experience and increases the chance that visitors will stay on the page and interact with it. A clear paragraph structure, short sentences, less complex words: all of this helps not only the visitor but also search engines understand online content. Yoast SEO provides automatized checks for all of these aspects of good content, and more, as part of its readability analysis.
In this lunch lecture, we uncover the way we make Yoast SEO’s readability analysis work for any website. We start by briefly introducing the WordPress ecosystem and its quirks. Then, we look at how search engines work and how SEO helps them find a website’s content. After that, we introduce and showcase our Readability analysis as one of the pillars of good SEO. We end with a sneak peek under the hood, where we’ll reveal some of the inner workings of our analysis.