When you become a content developer, certain aspects of writing evolve to a level of importance in your life that you previously never even knew about.

For instance, there is a certain SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Traffic Light that forever haunts me from the back-end of WordPress websites as I develop content. This Traffic Light is connected to SEO and measures the effectiveness of my SEO writing. The concept is comparable to your everyday stoplight: it lets me know when it is safe to launch copy into the stratosphere of the interwebs by turning an incredibly satisfying green. It also lets me know when edits are necessary via various shades of red and yellow. Though reds and yellows are never the end goal, they do allow me to specialize copy which in turn maximizes the performance of a client’s website.

In technical terms, this so-called Traffic Light is actually a plugin for WordPress courtesy of Yoast. It is designed to instruct the user on how to write better content via a built-in content analysis function. In addition to that guidance, it makes it easy to optimize a website’s titles and descriptions for Google. Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin is self-described by Yoast as the most complete WordPress SEO plugin currently available. Its high functionality helps to extensively analyze pages, optimizing content like image titles and meta descriptions.

In addition to training a content writer to be privy to the subtle nuances of SEO, the program designers also developed an interactive, easy-to-understand interface to help guide writers in the right direction.

For example, to gauge the effectiveness of a certain web page’s copy, one merely has to click the ‘SEO Check’ button and a magical list of color-coded bullets appears at the top of your Page Builder. How else would I know my copy’s Flesch Reading Ease test score or how to pan out over-used focus keywords?

In some ways, this system makes my life easier, changing colors (the dreaded red!) to show me    whether or not my copy is on-point. Of course it also makes my life harder because I am constantly    writing to keep it happy.

At the end of the day, though, I’m grateful for this tool that helps me to better understand the business of words when it comes to SEO and website development. Without it, the learning curve would be much greater and my copy writing would not be as efficient. So to the folks over at Yoast who designed the concept of the SEO Traffic Light, I thank you.

 

 

By: Alli Sarazen {Cadence Labs Content Specialist}

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