a better look with our linguists • Yoast
Willemien Hallebeek
Willemien is the manager content of yoast.com. She loves making content easy to use and easy for people and search engines to find.
This month we commemorate 5 years since the Yoast SEO Readability Check was first published! We have made further improvements since then. We sat down with our linguistics team leader Manuel Augustin and researcher and developer Hanna Worku to get a deeper look at how the readability check works and how the tool can be adapted to support more languages.
The Yoast linguistics team
First, can you tell us a little more about the team? For example, what are your backgrounds, are you all linguists?
Manuel: “Our team is one of the most international teams and we are all linguists. While most of us are big language nerds, our other interests are hiking, dancing, playing music, and gardening. We continue to learn how to grow as a developer, which has been challenging but a very rewarding experience. “
How many languages do you speak together?
Hanna: “Although knowledge of many languages is not crucial for linguistic research, it is definitely helpful! For example, it makes working with less familiar grammatical systems a lot easier. Our team speaks a total of 14 languages. “
The advantages and disadvantages of the readability check
Can you briefly explain what Yoast SEO readability analysis does?
Hanna: “The Yoast SEO Readability Checker analyzes the user’s contribution and tells them what can be done to make it more readable. The analysis shows the user where the legibility of the text can be improved, for example which sentences have to be rewritten. This input helps users create posts that are SEO friendly, engaging, accessible to a wider audience, and ranked higher. ”
How do you know what makes a text readable? How do you measure that?
Manuel: “A text is considered legible if it is easy to read and understand. There are several main qualities of readable text. For example, short sentences are easier to understand than long sentences. The use of connecting words (e.g. “however”, “beyond”, “finally”) and sub-headings make the content more appealing and easier to understand. Depending on the language, the use of active language (‘They built the house’) is preferred to passive language (‘They built the house’). ”
Hanna: “Our first investigations helped to estimate ratios that make the text analysis more consistent. For example, if at least 30% of the sentences in your text contain a transitional word, the bullet for checking the transitional words will be green. If they are used in more than 20% or less than 30% of your sentences, you will get an orange ball. And the ball turns red when less than 20% of the sentences in your text contain a transitional word. “
From examining legibility to checking legibility
Can you explain a little more about the research process and how you translate that into readability checks?
Manuel: “We keep starting to add a new check with the exploration of the language. The first goal of the research is to find out if (and how) our existing readability checks apply to them. The second goal is to find ideas for readability checks that can be added specifically for that language. After doing the research, we add all the necessary data for analyzing a text in the language: e.g. B. what passive language looks like in this language or how many words can be expected from an average sentence length. “
Hanna: “To make sure we include as much relevant knowledge as possible, we are working with a native speaker advisor who will take part in the research and provide feedback on the first version of the feature. Some of the readability checks are used for each language (e.g. paragraph length, presence of subheadings), while others depend on the language in question. Since the characteristics of the language play a large role in the readability of a text, researching the language in question is an important step in adding the ratings. “
The overall readability rating
Yoast SEO gives a score for individual checks, but also a total score. How do you settle all these checks? When do you think all of the text is legible enough to get a green ball?
Hanna: “There are indeed several reviews that analyze the readability of your post, some of which are language dependent. Many of these tests are based on sentences. For example, we check whether too many sentences start with the same word and whether enough connecting words have been used across sentences. Other reviews pay attention to how the content is organized: e.g. B. Checking paragraph length and checking the presence of sub-headings. “
Manuel: “The entire ball turns green when most of the legibility tests are covered. It’s worth noting that an individual exam should be used as a guide rather than an instruction. In the end, it is up to the user to decide which review is most relevant and actionable based on their style and genre. “
The legibility check has been in place for 5 years. How has it developed over time? Have we changed or adjusted checks?
Manuel: “So far, the assessment of legibility has not changed drastically. However, we continue to work both on improving the existing readability checks and researching ideas for new ones. For example, we have the idea of adding a check for double negatives. It’s also important that we add readability checks that are more language-specific. When we get deeper insight into a particular language, we can improve the rating by adding reviews that are specific to the user’s language. “
Readability in different languages
The full readability analysis is now available in 15 languages. Are there any notable differences in readability between languages?
Hanna: “So far there have been no noticeable differences, but there are some differences between the languages in terms of sentence length. For example, an average sentence in Spanish is longer than an average sentence in English. We also examine groups of words that affect readability in one language but not in another. “
What about non-alphabetic languages? For example, what would a readability check in Japanese look like? Do we have any plans to add non-alphabetic languages?
Manuel: “We want to work on that in the future. The least known writing systems we have worked with so far have been Hebrew and Arabic. Our future plans include Japanese and Persian. There are definitely some differences. For example, languages like Japanese and Chinese do not have spaces between words, so the concept of counting the number of words for long sentences, for example, is not quite the same. “
Working on the readability checks
What is a day in the life of a Yoast linguist like? Do you spend most of your time doing readability checks?
Hanna: “We spend a lot of time both on readability and on SEO analysis (keyword), especially for premium functions. For example, research on adding word shape support is particularly extensive because it implements code that can recognize different shapes of a word (e.g., planted is recognized as a plant). Another important part of our work is to improve the existing code (e.g. make it more understandable), take into account user feedback and exchange new ideas for further ways of analyzing texts. “
We are looking for linguists
As we keep adding languages to Yoast SEO, we’re expanding our language team. Are you a linguist and would you like to come to Yoast? We have 4 vacancies in this team at the moment! Starting with a young researcher up to a senior computational linguist. You can find all vacancies on our job page.
Do you feel more like a linguist or a developer in your work?
Manuel: “It definitely depends on the task. Adding a new language to the plugin always involves both linguistic research and coding. Since we concentrate on making our functions available in as many languages as possible, both coding and language research are always in the picture. One of the most exciting research tasks is exploring ideas for new features, such as a language level rating, that will help users determine the level of difficulty of their text. Another big part of the research is on improving the feedback we give on users’ content. For example, to make it more actionable. Sometimes we just work with code: we reorganize it, add documentation to it, and revise it to make it more consistent and understandable. “
What’s your biggest annoyance when it comes to text readability? Do we have a check for it?
Manuel: “For English I would probably choose the overuse of passive voice. This makes a text sound more impersonal and less dynamic. When we add a new language, we investigate whether the passive voice affects readability in that language. If this turns out to be correct, we will investigate how passive language in that language can be recognized and added to the readability checker. “
Find out about the latest languages and features
Thank you for sharing these behind-the-scenes insights, Manuel and Hanna! For more information on the 5th anniversary of our readability analysis, see this interview with Yoast CEO Marieke van de Rakt and Irene Strikkers, the original authors of the analysis.
We are constantly developing new features for the Yoast SEO plugin and adding new languages as well. Would you like even more features in your SEO toolkit? Upgrade to Yoast SEO Premium to access the full collection and take your SEO to the next level:
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