Yoast Flesh Reading Ease Test assign a score to your content based on its readability where 90-100 is considered being a good score and 0-30 a terrible score.
Refining Content: Yoast Flesh Reading Test
They design the Yoast Flesh Reading Test to understand the reading difficulty of any passage or chunk of text. The test, through its scores, shows what minimum age and qualification of people will the passages be easily understood.
They do this with two things:
- How the amount of words relates to the number of sentences (average length of your sentences)
- How the number of syllables (word or part of word contain one vowel sound) relates to the number of words (average number of syllables per word)
Need for Flesh Reading Test
The target while writing general web content is that it should be able to be understood by 13-year-olds and above. Special cases, like scholarly articles aside, the internet is intended for viewers of almost all ages. This means that the content on it should be understood by all too.
If your content is too hard to read, your viewership will decrease. It has become more and more important to become user-oriented to rank higher in search results. So, receiving a high readability score will help you a lot.
How to Pass Yoast Flesh Reading Test
The test score ranges from 0 to 100. And higher the number better the readability.
The following steps will help you achieve a higher readability score:
- If you do not use too many difficult words and you keep your sentences rather short, the check will pass.
- Keep your audience in mind while writing or editing content. Will it be easy enough for them to understand? It can be for people living simple lives or for scientists, the difficulty should match the people.
- It is a general practice to your common or layman’s terms while writing for an audience outside a professional circle. This means try to substitute difficult words with easy ones wherever possible.
- Clear usage of language always helps.
Keeping these pointers in mind will let you achieve good readability score.
Concluding Remarks:
While numbers can always be wrong, be it because of different writing styles, or for the difference in audience, what matters is writing for the audience. Till it satisfies the targeted audience, you are doing it right.
Lecture 4: Secret Weapon to generate backlinks