I use an SEO Plugin to optimize posts like this to get the best search engine rankings I can.
It’s the Yoast SEO plugin and it offers a number of features to get me the optimal SEO score.
Yoast covers variables like how long a post is, whether the keyword appears the right number of times, whether the images have alt tags including the keyword, if I’ve included outbound links, and a lot more including a peculiar “readability” metric.
With Yoast, readability is evaluated by the unfortunately-named Flesch Reading Test. Flesh has three main levels of readability, as indicated by chart below.
As you can see, there’s a pretty large gap between what Flesch considers readable for university graduates vs.15 year-old students.
My posts tend to fall within that gap, usually scoring in the mid to high 50s. So I guess they’re well understood by a high school junior but a little dull for a Harvard grad.
Nonetheless, they score lower than 60, which for Yoast and as indicated by the chart is some kind of important threshold. The Yoast SEO Plugin then warns me that my text is “difficult to read.” Consider shortening your sentences.”
And being a dutiful digital citizen, I trim wherever I can.
But more often than not, no matter how much I try, how much I dumb down my writing, how much I make it easy-breezy like the copy I wrote when I worked in advertising, Dear Reader, the Yoast SEO Plugin insists that I haven’t gone far enough.
The ideology behind all this is worth thinking about.
Google wants us to write for 14 year-olds.
Now, I’ve got nothing against young people. I simply don’t want to . What I write is not for them.