New AI content tools are popping up left and right. These tools can help you write a social post, or a whole blog post, answer any question, or even create a brand-new image! This is great and helpful when you only have a little time or need more inspiration. But the big question is, are AI tools actually helping us? Should we be using them to create our content? This blog post will discuss AI content and why we should be mindful of how we use it.
AI-generated content is skyrocketing
AI, or Artificial Intelligence, refers to systems that perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as perception, learning, reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making. And right now, there’s an explosion of AI tools in all shapes and sizes.
The widespread adoption of AI-powered content generators makes it easier than ever to produce content quickly at scale. With just a few clicks, anyone can generate a half-hearted, generic article that a person must edit to fit the tone of their business and make it factual.
It’s easy to get swept up in all the excitement and generate lots of content using these new, shiny tools. There is, however, something we can’t and shouldn’t ignore when using these AIs. It might not surprise you that using an AI tool to create your content results in similar content to others. For one, this isn’t great for your SEO.
It also results in a much bigger issue that affects all of us. This content often isn’t diverse and inclusive at all. It’s created by AIs that were trained with biased content. And this content is often written by the same type of person. Let’s dive into this and find out what can be done!
Using AI tools will create an echo-chamber
One of the main concerns with AI-generated content is the lack of originality and authenticity. While algorithms can mimic the style and tone of existing content, they can’t replace the creativity and originality of real people.
AI-generated content often lacks nuance, depth, and originality, which can harm the credibility and reputation of a brand. Moreover, using AI-generated content can perpetuate stereotypes, bias, and exclusionary practices, as algorithms tend to replicate existing patterns and preferences.
Because AI content tools make it so easy to create content, it’s now easier than ever to produce the same content as everyone else. And if everyone uses the same AI to create content, no one is creating new content. We will, in effect, create an echo chamber with no new thoughts or ideas coming in. This leads to a narrow and non-inclusive view of the world.
François Chollet had a delightful tweet about his thoughts on AI content:
AI is like the that guy in meetings who just repeats what someone else has just said, to sound smart
Related to this, Maggie Harrison at Futurism wrote an interesting article about ChatGPT essentially being an automated mansplaining machine. Having just this one, far from inclusive, point of view of the world is hurtful to society in so many ways. It doesn’t account for the vast diversity of people and points of view in our world. Nor does it champion groups of people that have often been neglected and marginalized in the past.
AI training sets have a bias
The Large Language Models (LLMs) that power the likes of Google Bard, Microsoft’s Bing assistant, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT are trained on content from today’s internet. And while most people would like to believe that the internet is diverse and inclusive, it has some very questionable corners.
We should try to strive for a world that’s much more inclusive than it is today. Using public forums on the internet to train your AIs may not be the best idea. In recent years this has lead to AIs becoming racist and biased.
A few examples
Using the internet of today to train AIs has multiple inclusion problems. This means that the AIs themselves become racist, sexist, or ableist because the content they are being trained on is racist, sexist, or ableist. Let’s look at a couple of examples.
Amazon’s AI hiring debacle
Take, for example, Amazon’s hiring AI. They developed this tool as the “holy grail†of hiring to help them find the right people for the job. Amazon used ten years’ worth of mostly male resumes to train the AI. Of course, this is a reflection of the tech industry overall, but it also means that the tool became sexist.
They may not have intended to create a sexist AI, but because the data it had been fed was skewed towards more male hires, it thought it was doing the right thing. AI will always be biased if the data they are using to train is biased.
Image creation can also be problematic
Another example of AI’s going racist is AI image creation. If you want to generate an image of a romantic couple holding hands, it’s not uncommon to see that all the generators give back predominately white people. In July 2021, Dall-E 2 updated its tool to “more accurately reflect the diversity of the world’s population.†Unfortunately, it still produces photos that are non-diverse. It would only show people of color when you added the word “poor†to the prompt.
This isn’t just limited to people of color; the LGBTQI+ community also fell prey to these non-inclusive images. Of course, the tools can make adjustments to their systems. We still have a long way to go to reflect the world that we are in. As Zoe Larkin (Levity) writes in the blog post on AI bias: “Unfortunately, AI is not safe from the tendencies of human prejudice. It can assist humans in making more impartial decisions, but only if we work diligently to ensure fairness in AI systems.”
Don’t forget about the human edit
To some extent, it’s acceptable to use AI tools as shortcuts. Today, however, content creators use them without considering the data that fed the AIs. This leads to the reinforcement and expansion of echo chambers and contributes to the creation of similar content and the production of racist and non-inclusive/diverse images.
As a result, content creators need to be more aware of the data and algorithms used by AI tools to ensure that their content is authentic, diverse, and inclusive and does not perpetuate stereotypes or exclusionary practices.
A lot of online content is not representative
Amazon’s hiring tool and Dall-E 2 are a few examples of AI content generators going rogue. And it is not strange that AI content tools are going the same way because the internet is filled with content written by English-speaking mediocre white cis men.
For example, a study by Oxford University’s Internet Institute found that (mostly male) editors in the western part of the world made most of the contributions to Wikipedia, creating a skewed worldview.
Even if this is a part of your target audience, it is not the only audience. People from all backgrounds with all kinds of experiences currently make up just a small percentage of voices heard.
If we want to break the cycle of this continuous repeating of the same content, we need to improve at writing and creating more inclusive content. That way, we can train the AIs of the future on a more inclusive and diverse internet.Â
Make today’s content better for the future
Try not to be that person from the meeting who repeats what others say. Produce content in your voice and make it accessible to the broadest possible audience. All of this makes for a better internet for everyone.
Communicate appropriately with the audience that you are trying to reach. When you’re writing inclusively, you, my friend, are helping to create content that will make the internet of the future a better place.
Be aware of your own bias
It’s not only AIs that have this bias; we all have an unconscious bias that we are trying to unlearn and evolve. That’s what got us here in the first place. We all need to do better to write more inclusive content. Only by taking the time to write inclusive content will we shape today’s internet. This, in turn, means that we can train the AI tools of the future on more inclusive and less derogatory language.
That’s a big responsibility, we know. And this is not something that will change overnight; it will take time. We’ll undoubtedly get it wrong. But, by making an effort now to create diverse and inclusive content, we’ll start the ball rolling to a better internet.
So, what can we do?
You can use AI tools as part of your content creation process. However, you must do a human edit before hitting publish. Be critical of the content that rolls out of the AI tool. Make sure to do a fact-check. And make the much-needed adjustments. You shouldn’t just adjust the tone of voice in your content but also check it for diversity and inclusivity. You should pinpoint any problematic content. Improve it to a point where anyone can relate to it and you’re comfortable with it.
How to make your content more inclusive
It can be hard to know where to start. That’s where tools can help get you on the path to a more inclusive and diverse internet. For example, our inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO. This new analysis helps you to spot when you may have unconsciously used a term that is not inclusive or is, in fact, racist, sexist or ableist.
Much like our readability analysis, it looks through your text for words from our database that are racist, sexist, non-inclusive or derogatory. It will help you become aware of those non-inclusive words and phrases. You’ll get feedback and proper alternatives that can improve your content to ensure that site visitors feel spoken to. With just a few small steps in the right direction, we can all hopefully make the world and the web a more inclusive and diverse place for future generations. And for future AIs.
As someone working on SEO, you must understand the importance of site speed. You must realize that fast sites equal happy users and happy search engines. PageSpeed Insights is an invaluable tool from Google that can help you optimize your website. It enables you to improve your rankings by giving you everything you need to boost the performance of your website. This guide will provide an overview of PageSpeed Insights. We’ll discuss what it is, how it works, and how you can optimize your website.
PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a free tool offered by Google. It provides valuable insights into the performance and speed of your pages. The tool evaluates website performance and page experience based on several key metrics, including loading speed, resource utilization, images, and other media optimization. PSI works at a page level, so a good score for a page does not automatically equal a good score for your entire site.
The tool provides a score from 0 to 100, with 100 being the “fastest” and most “performant” web page. Note that getting a score of 100 is not something you need to aim for by any means. But your pages should pass the general Core Web Vitals Assessment. Remember those words; you’ll hear them often — more on this topic further down this article.
The PageSpeed Insights page after running a test for cnn.com
PageSpeed Insights provides data on how quickly your page loads, how many resources it uses, and how many requests it makes when loading. Then it also offers suggestions on how to make your pages better. With the help of this tool, you can identify areas of improvement. Use that knowledge to make the necessary changes to improve your website’s rankings.
In addition, PageSpeed Insights also checks your page on SEO and accessibility aspects and other best practices. In this article, we’ll focus on site speed and performance checks.
To understand PSI and how it fits into the page speed part of SEO, please read the following articles:
PageSpeed Insights runs tests and analyzes the HTML, JavaScript, and other resources that make up your website. The tool then provides a detailed report highlighting areas where the page the test was run on can be optimized. These suggestions include specific recommendations for improving your website’s speed and performance. The tool evaluates how your site functions on desktop and mobile devices, ensuring you optimize your website for all users.
An insight into PageSpeed Insight
Here’s a little bit more insight into how the test process works:
URL analysis: The first step in the PSI process is examining the URL being tested. This URL can be any online content with a valid URL, such as a product page, blog post, or other web-based material. Remember that a PSI test is specific to this URL and doesn’t automatically translate to your overall website performance.
Retrieving page content: Once the URL is submitted, PageSpeed Insights will retrieve the page’s content, including the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and all other elements necessary to render the page.
Performance evaluation: After the page content is retrieved, PSI will conduct several tests to assess the page’s speed and efficiency. These tests analyze factors like page size and structure, resource quantity and size, and page load time.
Optimization recommendations: Based on the results of the performance tests, PageSpeed Insights provides suggestions for optimizing the page to improve it. These recommendations include reducing image size, simplifying CSS and JavaScript, enabling browser caching, and reducing the number of requests made to the server.
Scores: PSI will assign a score to the page based on its how it does. The score ranges from 0 to 100, with higher scores representing better performance. It calculates the score based on the test results and optimization recommendations.
It’s worth noting that PageSpeed Insights only assesses how a single page on your website performs. It does not take appearance or functionality into account. However, enhancing this often positively impacts how people perceive your site.
Google frequently updates PSI to provide the most current information and accurate results. By utilizing PageSpeed Insights, you can gain a deeper understanding of page performance. It helps you improve the user experience and increase your website’s overall speed and efficiency.
PSI metrics: lab data vs. field data
PageSpeed Insights offers a combination of laboratory and real-world data to help you comprehend and enhance your site’s functionality. The lab data represents a simulation of the website’s performance in a managed setting. The field data portrays actual metrics collected from real users visiting the website.
The lab data is obtained by conducting automated tests on the website through a standard testing environment. The tests assess load time, resource utilization, rendering speed, and more. Lab data provides a foundation for performance. It helps you spot problems impacting user experiences, like slow-loading recourses or unoptimized images. One of the weaknesses of lab data is that it’s for a specific point in time, and external factors like the weather, network stress, whether there’s a football game on, etc., can all affect real user experience. Your website needs to anticipate that.
The field data, on the other hand, delivers a more precise representation of how users encounter the website in the real world. This data is collected by monitoring users’ browsers and comes from the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX). Field data offers valuable perspectives on user interaction with the website, such as which pages are slow or visually unstable. It also considers how factors like network connectivity and device type impact user experience.
Both laboratory and field data have advantages and limitations, making it crucial to use both to understand a website truly. Lab data provides a baseline and helps identify problems, while field data offers a more authentic view of user experience. By merging both data types, you can make informed choices on optimizing your website and enhancing the user experience.
Getting started with PageSpeed Insights
Starting with PageSpeed Insights is very easy. You can just enter the URL of the page you want to test into the tool and click the blue Analyze button. The tool will then run a series of tests on your page and generate a report. The report will provide a score for that specific URL’s performance and recommendations for improvement.
PSI only works at a page level. It looks at the one URL you enter to analyze — it is not a tool for side-wide analysis. Therefore, it’s good to test various pages of your site, as your homepage will perform differently from a blog post or a product page on your ecommerce site. Together, you’ll get a good sense of your site’s overall performance and where the bottlenecks are.
Enter your URL in the text field and hit the Analyze button
Getting the recommendation is easy, but implementing or fixing the issues is another story. The issues are prioritized, with the most pressing issues at the top. It also lists the opportunities it sees that help boost the scores of your page. The colored bar shows how many seconds you could save by implementing the improvements. Here, the red bars have the biggest impact on how your page performs.
Take action on the recommendations provided by the tool to improve your website’s performance. With PSI, you can start improving your website right away.
Key metrics evaluated by PageSpeed Insights
Some time ago, Google introduced the Page Experience algorithm update. With it came the Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics that measure the real-world user experience of a website. The Core Web Vitals include LCP, FID, and CLS. These metrics are crucial to determining how well a page scores on the test. This test aims to replicate a user’s experience loading and using a website.
Improving the Core Web Vitals of your website is essential for optimizing your website for both user experience and search engine rankings. You can ensure that your website loads quickly by improving your LCP, FID, CLS, and other key metrics. It provides users with a positive experience that will keep them on your website longer.
Some key metrics detailed
PageSpeed Insights evaluates the Page Experience of a site based on several key metrics, including:
First Contentful Paint (FCP): This metric measures the time it takes for the first content on a page to become visible to the user. A fast FCP helps ensure that users don’t have to wait long to see something on the screen after landing a page.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric measures the time it takes for the largest content element on a page to become fully visible to the user. A fast LCP is crucial for a good user experience, as it indicates when the page will likely be fully loaded and ready to use.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This metric measures the stability of a page during loading and user interaction. A low CLS score indicates that the page’s content does not shift around as it loads, providing a better user experience. The CLS forms 25% of the ranking weight.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP): This metric measures how a page responds to user interaction by updating the screen. A fast INP helps provide a smooth user experience, ensuring that the page reacts quickly to user inputs.
First Input Delay (FID): This metric measures the time a page responds to the first user interaction, such as clicking a button or entering text. A fast FID helps to ensure that the page reacts quickly to user inputs, providing a better user experience.
Time to First Byte (TTFB): This metric measures the duration from when a browser requests a page until the first byte of data from the server arrives at the client. TTFB is a crucial metric for website performance and user experience as it indicates any bottlenecks in the server-side processing or if the server is taking too long to generate the content.
Total Blocking Time (TBT): This metric calculates the time during which a website’s primary content is prevented from being displayed to users. This metric is significant as it reflects the period during which users cannot interact with the website or access its content, affecting the user experience. The TBT determines 30% of the ranking score.
The most recent scoring weights provided by Lighthouse for PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights also has a Speed Index
In addition to the Core Web Vitals and these additional metrics, PageSpeed Insights also considers other factors when calculating scores. The Speed Index is a metric that gauges the perceived loading speed of a website. It offers a rating based on the speed at which the website’s content becomes visible during the loading process, from start to finish.
The Speed Index is a crucial metric to be aware of and monitor, as it demonstrates how quickly users can view and interact with the website’s content. A website that loads quickly can increase user engagement, reduce bounce rates, and improve conversions. Thus, monitoring the Speed Index score and taking action to improve it, if needed, is important to you.
PSI also makes the loading process insightful with screenshots of your site
The scores in PageSpeed Insights provide a general indication of how well your page does. You should not see this as the only factor determining the overall user experience. By addressing the issues identified by PageSpeed Insights, you can improve performance and provide a better user experience.
The overview screen with Web Vitals scores
Opening the results screen, you see six colored bars of The Core Web Vitals Assessment. PageSpeed Insights provides a snapshot of how well a site performs based on three important metrics, the Core Web Vitals and three experimental metrics. These metrics evaluate crucial aspects of the user experience, including loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.
The Core Web Vitals Assessment section
In the Core Web Vitals Assessment section, you’ll find an easy-to-understand evaluation of how the website performs for each of these metrics based on data. Further down the page, you’ll find suggestions for enhancing the website for each metric to improve the user experience.
In the diagnose performance issues section, you’ll find a graphic representation of the loading process of your page. It also features scores for performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO.
Keep an eye on these Core Web Vitals, and make a fast, responsive, and visually stable website. All of this is crucial for attracting and retaining users.
The Diagnostics screen lists improvements
The Diagnostics section in PageSpeed Insights provides in-depth insights and advice for enhancing your website. There is a lot to find here, but let’s look at a popular one as an example. One of its suggestions is to Reduce the impact of third-party code.
PSI shows which scripts block the loading of your page
Third-party code refers to scripts and widgets hosted on external servers and embedded into a website. These can significantly affect a site’s performance by slowing page load times and utilizing resources.
PageSpeed Insights helps you pinpoint the third-party scripts affecting your website’s speed. You can find this in the Reduce the impact of third-party code suggestion. It displays information about each third-party script’s size, type, and effect and recommends reducing its impact.
For instance, the tool may advise minimizing non-critical third-party scripts or optimizing script loading through lazy or asynchronous loading methods. Also, hosting third-party scripts on a content delivery network (CDN) to improve loading speed by reducing latency.
Following PageSpeed Insights’ suggestions in the Diagnostics section helps you minimize the impact of these issues.
How to improve your PageSpeed Insights score
Improving the performance of your site helps improve your PageSpeed Insights score. Below you’ll find a sampling of things you can do to make your site faster. We discuss this topic in more detail in our post on page speed.
Minimize the size of resources: The size of the resources on your website, such as images and other media, can significantly impact your website’s speed and performance. Minimizing the size of these resources can help reduce the time it takes for your website to load.
Optimize images:Optimizing images is one of the most effective ways to make your site faster. You can optimize images by compressing them, reducing their size, and converting them to a more optimized format.
Choose a better web host: The quality of your web host plays a critical role in the speed and reliability of your website. A good web host should provide fast and stable server resources, network connectivity, and a server location close to your target audience (with a CDN).
Use a content delivery network (CDN): A CDN can help distribute your website’s resources across multiple servers, reducing the load on your server and making your website perform better.
Minimize plugins: Plugins can slow down your website and negatively impact how it performs. Minimizing plugins and choosing lightweight, high-quality plugins can help improve your website’s speed and performance.
Use lazy loading: Lazy loading is a technique that only loads images and other resources when needed rather than loading them all at once. This can help reduce the time it takes for your website to load.
By following these tips, you can improve your PageSpeed Insights score. The result is a faster, performant website that provides a better user experience and ranks higher in search results.
Conclusion
PageSpeed Insights is an invaluable tool for everyone working on the SEO of their sites. The tool provides valuable insights into how your website performs and how fast it loads. Make sure that you understand the key metrics evaluated by PageSpeed Insights. After that, optimize your website accordingly. This way, you can improve the performance, resulting in a better user experience. In turn, that might lead to higher rankings in search engines!
On the 11th of May, people from all over the world will come together for another edition of YoastCon. An SEO conference like no other! It will be fun, it will be knowledge-packed and it will be accessible to everyone. So if you have anything to do with online marketing or SEO, you should not miss out! And if you’re not the one making that decision, we can help you out. In this blog post, we’ll share 7 tactics that you can use to persuade your employer to buy you a ticket. You can pick one or try them all, whatever gets you to YoastCon!
Want to join us at YoastCon 2023? You can find the full schedule and buy your tickets through our YoastCon page! We can’t wait to see all of you on the 11th of May, 2023!
Why should you convince your employer?
YoastCon is the place to be for people who want to know all there is to know about SEO. And because we haven’t been able to have an offline YoastCon for a few years now (due to the pandemic), we’ve decided to go big with this year’s edition!
There will be 13 world-renowned speakers with expertise in the field of SEO or online marketing. You can attend keynote talks by Jes Scholz, Luke Carthy, Hannah Thorpe, Barry Adams, Miriam Schwab, Thierry Muller, Kate Toon, Els Aerts and Greg Gifford. In addition, our resident experts Jono Alderson, Marieke van de Rakt, Thijs de Valk and Joost de Valk will be speaking. During the day, there will also be a few workshops that you can attend to work on your website!
In between the keynote talks and workshops, there will be a few breaks that give you the opportunity to talk to other attendees or a few of the speakers. There will also be a dinner and afterward, we’ll have some drinks to unwind and chat with each other. With YoastCon being a more intimate event, this really gives you the space to get to know other people or ask one of the experts your question in real life! Check out the full schedule and more on our YoastCon page.
7 tactics to persuade your employer to let you attend YoastCon
Now that you have an idea of why you should be at YoastCon 2023, it’s time to secure that ticket! Not sure how to convince your employer of the importance of YoastCon? We’ve got your back! Here are 7 persuasion tactics you can use:
1. Foot in the door
With this tactic, you ask for a small favor first and follow it up with a bigger one. Your employer will get into the flow of feeling committed to helping you, so granting your second favor feels like a continuation of something they’ve already agreed to.
2. Door in the face
Funnily enough, you can also do this the other way around. Ask for a big favor first and follow it up with a much smaller one. When you ask for something they’re likely to disagree with, this creates a feeling of guilt. They tend to agree with the second, easier request to get rid of that bad feeling. Bonus: you might get both!
3. Reciprocity
If you’ve done someone a favor, they feel like they have to or want to repay you. People tend to feel obliged to return favors! If you can’t think of anything awesome to do right now, just remind them of a favor or something you’ve done in the past.
4. Social proof
You might already be familiar with this tactic if you work in marketing: social proof. Individuals reflect on other people’s behavior and tend to act likewise, to assure they conduct appropriate behavior. It also builds trust to see other people doing something that you’re considering. Show your employer that others are doing it!
5. Scarcity
When something is scarce, people tend to value it more. If an event doesn’t take place that often, they’ll feel the need to take the chance when it does! Convince them the availability is limited and they’re more likely to want it and act upon it right away.
6. Commitment and consistency
People like to stick to their actions and beliefs. Follow their line of consistency by proposing something that fits in with their belief and goals, they won’t be able to disagree!
7. Emotional manipulation
A type of social influence that can come from different angles, for example by evoking pity. This is for when you get really desperate and we don’t encourage you to do so, but you could give it a try. For some employers, a sad pout should do the trick. Otherwise, excessive crying might work!
We hope to see you at YoastCon 2023!
Hopefully, we’ve convinced you (and your employer) to join us on the 11th of May, 2023, for the most fun SEO event of the year. And hopefully, you didn’t have to resort to the last tactic to get your ticket. If you want to know more and check out the full schedule, go and read all about YoastCon. We can’t wait to see you there!
Your social media endeavors need to be a part of your SEO strategy. Especially now that the younger generations (Gen Z) are using platforms like TikTok and Instagram instead of Google. This means your site’s popularity on social media ties into your SEO more than ever!
But which social media should you focus on? With so many platforms out there, you can feel overwhelmed with choices. Don’t worry, though! You don’t have to be active everywhere. That isn’t always sustainable. And if your most loyal customers are on Twitter, and you’re focusing on Pinterest, then you miss out on many opportunities.
Instead, decide which platform your audience uses the most, then find a rhythm that works for you and build on that. Once you’ve got your social strategy in place, it’s time to start posting! Below are some tips you can use to set up or improve your social media strategy.
1. Keep your account alive
The most crucial advice when using social media is that you need to keep your account alive. But what does this mean? You’ll see a lot of advice about posting daily, but that’s not always realistic, especially if you’re a small business owner.
Our advice: keep your account alive by posting regularly and going at your own pace. If you can only post a couple of times a week, then do it. A good starting pointing is:
People will be able to tell that you’re being genuine and fall in love with you for that. What’s more, they’ll want to continue to follow you if you’re posting genuine content that they can relate to.
Of course, everybody needs a vacation, but you don’t want to abandon your followers. That’s why we recommend scheduling posts for the time you are away or letting people know when you’ll be back. And be sure to share some photos of your vacay!
Save time by automating
If you also have a blog where you write regularly, Yoast SEO Premium can help you automate some of your postings. With our Zapier integration, you can automate your social sharing and stay in control of what your social link posts look like. This integration makes it possible to automatically post to your favorite social network whenever you publish new content to your site. It saves you time without compromising on the quality of your social posts.
For social media like Instagram and TikTok, there are also a number of platforms that you can use to stay on top of your schedule and keep all your media in one place, ready to post.
2. Write captivating excerpts
Depending on the type of content you want to share, you need to make sure the copy that goes with your posts is appealing enough to draw people in. There are a number of ways you can approach this. For instance, you can choose the most important sentence or the main point of the blog post you’re going to share. You could also share the introduction of the post if you feel that is captivating enough.
Depending on the platform, you could share a story behind a photo you’re posting or the failures you’ve had when testing new products. Or maybe you just want to jump on the latest trend and apply it to your brand.
Is it thumb-stopping?
You want this piece of copy to get people to click on the link in your bio or read the whole caption on the platform. But the basic formula is:
Hook: Something that is going to grab their attention.
Pain point: What is it that your followers are struggling with?
Solution: Well, it’s a good thing you have an answer!
CTA: Don’t forget to ask your readers to do something.
If you want to learn more about copywriting for social media, check out our article about social media writing tips.
3. Diversify your posts
Having a few solid content pillars is important. They are particularly helpful in keeping you on track with your content creation. Need some inspiration? Here are a few different types of posts you could create. Remember, you’re no longer limited to just posting photos!
To help you out, let’s look at a few examples. First, you could share your blog posts with a link post. This is one of the most basic post types you can use:
Congratulations Piermario for receiving the #YoastCareFund! Nominated by @Luisa_Ravelli because of his contributions to the #WordPress community, Piermario is also heavily involved in WordCamps and Test contributions. Read more about him here https://t.co/OIysg6osWN
But don’t be afraid to change it up. Not all your social media posts need to necessarily direct people to your website. They can also be focused on informing people about a recent piece of news or simply increasing engagement on your social media platforms themselves.
And like we said in the intro, short-form videos are huge right now. They’re a great way to give your audience a few quick tips or take your fans behind the scenes.
To decide which posts do well on social media and which content you should make more of, you need to analyze the numbers. This could be the number of views, the number of comments, and how many times a post was shared or saved. Of course, numbers won’t mean anything if you don’t have a goal in mind. However, it’s a good rule of thumb to post more of the content that received numerous views, saves and shares.
Speaking of diversifying your content
At Yoast, we believe in the importance of inclusivity. In addition to diversifying when it comes to types of posts, you should also pay attention to making your content accessible and relatable, for as many people as possible. You need to show diversity to make this happen and being as visual as it is, social media is a great place for that. That being said, the topic of diversity shouldn’t be limited to your social media presence. This is a company-wide issue that you need to take seriously and nowadays is non-negotiable in both marketing and social media. Be aware of the image that you’re currently putting out there and invest time and resources into making that relatable to everyone.
But it’s not all about visuals. You should also use inclusive language, language that avoids excluding marginalized groups of people as much as possible. You might not get all of it right in one go, but becoming aware of it and changing it as you go is a great start. Not only does inclusive language help you reach a bigger audience, but it also helps all of us move toward a more inclusive society. And you might have noticed that social media platforms are being used a lot to talk about this and create more awareness on the topics of inclusiveness and diversity. So be part of the change and use inclusive language on your socials and in your website content. If you’re not sure where to start, our inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO gives you feedback on which words might be harmful and provides you with alternatives to use!
4. Handle comments
If you share your posts on social media, you’ll get comments. This is something many people forget about, or try to do in some cases. Because sometimes comments will be good, and sometimes they will be bad. But the comment section is also where conversations are happening. Answering questions, then following up with one of your own is a great way to keep your audience engaged.
Don’t forget to monitor your comments!
While you may get the odd troll in the comments, most of the time you’ll find your fans cheering you on and recommending you to their friends. There are some wonderful people in the comment section. Longtime followers can also become huge advocates for you and your brand, so make sure to have a chat with them.
But you should handle the trolls quickly! You don’t want your comments section to become a toxic place. Your fans won’t like it, but it can also have an effect on your mental health. So make sure your comments section is a safe space.
5. Use eye-catching photos or illustrations
Even with all the recent updates and focus on short-form video content, Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, said there is still a place for photo posts on Instagram. Just like on Facebook, where visual content is also essential. And let’s not forget Pinterest, which is all about images.
However, you might not have a graphic designer on staff or a photography department at your disposal. Don’t worry, though! There are plenty of online tools that can help you create your posts. Just remember to use clear images that either show your products or yourself. This could either be a crisp photo or a delightful illustration. Great quality will make your post stand out in someone’s feed, which can increase the post’s engagement, saves and shares.
Thankfully, if you’re using Yoast SEO Premium, you can check what your blog posts, product page or collections will look like before sharing them on social media. So you can easily adjust your content before posting it online. See how easy it is!
6. Be part of the community
If you’re not already part of a community, make one! Being active in a certain community or niche can help build allies, brand ambassadors, and new ideas. In any community, you’ll soon discover other interesting people. What’s more, talking to customers and end-users can be a great way for you to develop your product. And make sure to let people know that they are always welcome to join.
Additionally, you can make these people fall in love with your brand quicker by giving them exclusive access to discounts, Betas or just generally behind the scenes.
7. Add metadata
All the social platforms are becoming their own little search engines. So in order to be found, you need to make sure that you’re including some metadata in the form of hashtags. These can help your growth immensely. For instance, if you are at an event, include the hashtag for that event in your post. Everyone searching for the event will then come across it. There are also hashtags for certain interests or technology.
Some people also have bots set up that retweet everything that is posted in a certain hashtag, which is a great way to boost your post. But don’t go overboard! Nobody likes a post that is filled with all kinds of random hashtags. Keep them relevant to your post, and make sure they are accessibility-friendly!
Note that tags on social media work a lot differently than tags on your site. If you’re using tags on your site the same way you would on social media, take a look at this post to find out why that’s not good for your SEO.
Conclusion
Social media is a key aspect of every (off-page) SEO strategy. Setting up a comprehensive social media strategy can be hard. It will certainly ask for a bit of creativity, and it’ll definitely be time-consuming. But trust us when we say that it’ll be worth it! And if you think about it, social media and blogging are very similar in many aspects. You just need to get into the flow of it! Good luck!
Let’s say you have a website but know little about SEO. But you’ve heard about Yoast SEO, and people have told you it’s a great tool to optimize your site for Google, Bing, Yandex and other search engines. So you install the Yoast SEO plugin. What now? Well, our plugin needs your input to help your pages rise to the top of the search results. In this beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO, we’ll guide you through the most important steps to get the most out of this plugin and your content!
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which means optimizing your pages to get them to a high position in the search results of Google or other search engines. If you have a website and want to attract more people to it, SEO should be a part of your marketing strategy. Our plugin, Yoast SEO, helps you with that by fixing a lot of the technical stuff. But also by giving you feedback on your content to optimize it for SEO and your website users.
A beginner‘s guide to Yoast SEO
Before we start, note that this isn’t a guide to every single detail of the Yoast SEO plugin. This post introduces some important things that you should use or configure first. In this beginner’s guide, we assume that you have the plugin installed. Not quite there yet? Check out how to install Yoast SEO Premium or our free Yoast SEO plugin before you read on.
The Yoast SEO first-time configuration is a great starting point to set up your plugin. You will get the option to start the first-time configuration right after installing Yoast SEO. Don’t see the welcome screen or already have the plugin installed? You can also the configuration in the backend of your WordPress website by going to Yoast SEO > General and clicking the First-time configuration tab:
Start your Yoast SEO journey with the first-time configuration
The first-time configuration guides you through several steps that help you set up our plugin to suit your site’s needs. By answering a few simple questions, Yoast SEO will learn more about your website and how it can help out with your SEO. Even if your site has been around for a while, it still pays off to complete the configuration. It’s also a good idea to repeat it now and again to make sure your settings are still up to date. Because the information you fill in here helps Google and other search engines understand your site better.
For example, in the second step, you’ll be asked if your website is about you or an organization you represent. This is relevant because the information you fill in here is used in Google’s Knowledge Graph. What is a Knowledge Graph, you ask? It is the block of information you often see on the right-hand side of the search results when you search for a company or person. So make sure to fill in all the fields you can in this step to provide Google with this information and increase your chances of a Knowledge Graph. But the first-time configuration also improves your site’s technical settings with SEO data optimization and asks for your social media profiles to help Google understand these belong to the same person or company. If you want more help getting Yoast SEO configured correctly for your site, check out the help article on how to use the first-time configuration.
The tip of the technical iceberg
There are many aspects to SEO and many more settings you can tweak in the plugin. But we set the first-time configuration so that it correctly configures the plugin’s general settings for your website. And there’s also loads of other stuff that Yoast SEO handles for you, to give you a head start on your technical SEO. Here are a few of the things Yoast SEO automatically takes care of in the background. Our plugin:
Outputs structured data for your pages, helping Google understand them even better.
Creates an XML sitemap that search engines use to find and index your pages.
Yoast SEO Premium also avoids dead ends on your site by automatically creating redirects when you move or delete content.
There are lots more hidden features and settings that you control, we’ll talk about those later on. For now, it’s good to know that all of this allows Yoast SEO to roll out the red carpet for the search bots, making it easy for search engines to find and understand your content.
Using the Yoast SEO sidebar or meta box
Yoast SEO is known for its green, orange, and red traffic lights, giving you feedback that helps you optimize your content. Back in the day, you’d find these in the Yoast SEO meta box below your post editor. Nowadays, if you’re using the WordPress Block editor, you can also find them in the Yoast SEO sidebar on the right side of the editor.
Are you using the block editor, but not seeing the sidebar? Make sure to click on the Yoast SEO sidebar icon at the top right of your screen:
Click the Yoast SEO icon to open the Yoast SEO sidebar
Here, we’ll highlight four essential elements you’ll find in both the Yoast SEO meta box and the Yoast SEO sidebar:
The Focus keyphrase
The SEO analysis
The Readability analysis
The Google preview
When you write a post or page for your website, checking these four elements should be the bare minimum before publishing your content. If you have more time and want to fully optimize a post, we’d advise following the steps described in this blog post checklist.
The focus keyphrase
The focus keyphrase field is the first in the Yoast SEO sidebar and the meta box. In your Yoast SEO sidebar, on the right side of your editor, you’ll find this field at the top:
The focus keyphrase input field in the Yoast SEO sidebar
Below your post, you’ll find it in the SEO tab of the meta box:
The focus keyphrase input field in the Yoast SEO meta box
In this field, you can enter the phrase you’d like this specific post or page to rank for in the search engines. By adding this keyphrase (or keyword), Yoast SEO will give you feedback on how well you’ve optimized the content for that specific keyphrase. It’s good to note that adding a keyphrase here doesn’t mean that Google will ‘know’ that you want the page to rank for that keyphrase. It simply helps Yoast SEO give you helpful feedback, so adding the keyphrase without looking at any of the feedback will not do anything for your rankings.
You can add this keyphrase at any moment, but we suggest adding it immediately as a reminder to keep your content focused on this topic. Wondering how to choose the perfect focus keyphrase? Read our guide on choosing a focus keyphrase, as it will help you select the right keyphrase you want to (and can) rank for. You can select a keyphrase post-by-post, but if you’re serious about your rankings, you must conduct keyword research first.
Yoast SEO Premium allows you to set related keyphrases and synonyms too, which is great if you want to take your SEO copywriting to the next level. You need user-focused and high-quality content to rank high in a (competitive) market. Because Google is getting smarter, Yoast SEO Premium recognizes variations of your keyphrase and helps you write natural and user-friendly content.
The SEO analysis
When you’ve added a keyphrase (and ideally a bit of content), Yoast SEO is able to run the SEO analysis. This analysis evaluates how well your content is optimized to rank for that keyphrase. For instance, it checks whether you’ve used the keyphrase enough and not too often. But also whether it’s in your SEO title, meta description, images, or subheadings. Moreover, it checks other SEO aspects of your content that are not related to your keyphrase, for instance, if you have any internal links to other articles on your website which is also important for search engines to understand your content.
The SEO analysis in the Yoast SEO sidebar
Getting orange or red traffic lights? Look at the feedback the analysis gives and try to make improvements where possible. To dive deeper into this, read our article on how to use Yoast SEO’s content analysis.
The readability analysis
Below the focus keyphrase field and SEO analysis, you can find the Readability analysis tab (in the Yoast SEO sidebar). It’s best to look at this tab after you’ve written the first version of your post or page. It gives you a red, orange, or green traffic light, which reflects your text’s readability score. This analysis contains a few different checks that our plugin automatically does on your content. Open the tab to find out how you score on all the individual checks and what you can improve on. You may wonder why you should look at this tab, but trust us: readability is crucial for SEO!
The Yoast SEO readability checks in the sidebar
If a traffic light is green, you’re doing great in that field. Is it orange or red? You can follow the instructions along with the traffic light to improve on this front. If there’s an eye icon, you can click that to see what part of the text still needs some checking. Now you don’t need to get every traffic light green but try to get the overall traffic light for the readability analysis green to end up with readable text. That way, the readability analysis helps you write easy-to-read content that your readers will love!
Our readability analysis works for many languages, and our team is working hard to add more languages as we go. If you’re interested in finding more about the logic behind this analysis, you can read more on how to use this analysis in Yoast SEO.
The inclusive language analysis
The third analysis that you can find in Yoast SEO is the inclusive language analysis which gives you feedback on any potentially non-inclusive words or phrases you’re using in your text. We at Yoast strongly believe that you should inclusive language in your content. Because creating inclusive content is good for both your users and SEO. Wondering how that works? Read more about it in our post on inclusive language and SEO.
The Yoast SEO inclusive language analysis in the sidebar
Wondering how it works and what the analysis looks at? You can read all that and more on our page dedicated to the inclusive language analysis. Also, it’s good to note that the inclusive language analysis is opt-in, so it won’t be activated by default. It’s up to you whether you want to get feedback on the inclusiveness of your content.
Does every traffic light need to be green?
No, not every single traffic light in the different analyses has to be green for your post or page to rank. Similarly, getting your post and traffic lights ‘all-green’ in no way guarantees that it will rank. While it’s tempting to aim for all-green traffic lights on every post or page without working on other aspects of your SEO, this isn’t the best SEO strategy. Proper keyword research and site structure always come before getting green bullets. Read more about properly using the colored traffic light system in Yoast SEO.
The Google preview
In addition to analyzing your content, we provide an editable snippet or Google preview. In the meta box below your post, it’s in the SEO tab, and in the sidebar, you can find it here:
You can find all the features of Yoast SEO in the sidebar in the block editor
The Google preview makes it easy to optimize your post for the search results
In the Google preview, you can set an SEO title and meta description. Make an effort and write a title and meta description that reflect what your post or page is about. Let people know they’ll find what they’re looking for on your site and entice them to visit your page. There’s no guarantee that Google will display your meta description in the results pages. But if the meta description you add here is good, you’ll increase the odds of it being used.
Other items in the sidebar and meta box
As said before, we believe this is the minimum investment you should make before publishing a page or post. You may have noticed more items in the Yoast SEO sidebar and meta box, like the internal linking suggestions, social previews, Schema, cornerstone content, insights, and advanced section. It’s worth looking at those, as these can also help your SEO efforts!
A bit more advanced: Yoast SEO Settings
Of course, there is so much more you can do with Yoast SEO. You can access and change lots of settings in the Yoast SEO settings overview. There’s usually no need to change anything. Especially if you’re new to SEO, it’s wise to start with the settings you set with the first-time configuration. But let’s quickly look around to give you an idea of the options.
Go to Yoast SEO > Settings in the left-hand side navigation in your WordPress dashboard to go to the Settings overview. Here you can select which features you want to use, how your site should appear in search engines and loads more! Use the menu on your left to navigate the different settings that are divided into four categories: General, Content types, Categories & Tags and Advanced.
The Yoast SEO settings overview
When you go to the Yoast SEO Settings, you land on the Site features page in the General section. Here you can select which Yoast SEO features you want to actively use and which ones you want to opt out on. Each feature that is listed there comes with a short explanation of what it does and you can use the toggle below to activate or deactivate the feature.
Site basics
In the General section, you can also find Site basics. As the name suggests, you can configure the basics of your website here. Take the Title Separator, for instance. You can choose whether you want a dash, asterisk, or something else between the different parts of your SEO title that will be shown in the search results. But, if you change your mind later, you can always change it here. Read more about the options in our help article on the Yoast SEO Settings: Site basics.
Simply pick what you want, but the default option is usually the best one
In addition to the separator of your SEO title, you might also want to change how your SEO titles are set up. Simply go to Content types, click on Posts or any other content type (depending on which one you want to change) and go to Search Appearance. Here you can change how our plugin sets up your titles and meta descriptions. Set up by using snippet variables that tell the plugin what the title of your post is or the separator of your choice.
Change the variables in any way you like
This simply means we will use the title of your page or post as the page title. Then we add a title separator (which we discussed in the first paragraph of this section) and the site name you set when creating your site. So, for example, the title for this Beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO post would look like this:
Feel free to change this setup, but this is the one we recommend. It’s focused on the page title (Beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO) and has proper branding at the end (Yoast). We’re highlighting this to give you an example of the type of settings that you can find here, but of course, there are loads more.
We hope this gives you an idea of the options that Yoast SEO gives you. Throughout the years, we’ve introduced a lot of new features to our plugins. With that said, there are also many things we haven’t done in Yoast SEO, a few of them being things that we probably won’t ever do. If you’re curious as to what these are, check out our blog post on things we don’t do in Yoast SEO and why.
Other guides for (Yoast) SEO beginners
That’s it for our beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO. With Yoast SEO properly installed, your website is ready to take on the competition and climb to the top of the search results!
If you want to become a pro user of the Yoast SEO plugin, here are a few more reading recommendations:
After successfully introducing a new settings interface in Yoast SEO 20.0, we have more exciting news! We have built an integration with Mastodon, the decentralized and open-source social network. Yoast SEO Premium users can now verify the link in their Mastodon profile with this integration. We’re also adding your profile to the structured data we generate for your site. Plus, we’re improving our inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO 20.1.
Mastodon is picking up steam
Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, many people have moved to the popular open-source alternative, Mastodon.
Mastodon is part of the fediverse (a combination of the words federated and universe). Unlike Twitter, it’s a decentralized network of communities and platforms, powered by open-source communication software. This provides an alternative to centralized social media, giving users more control over their privacy and data. It also provides more options for people to join communities based on common interests and values.
Introducing a Mastodon integration to Yoast SEO 20.1
The Mastodon integration in Yoast SEO Premium does two things:
It helps you verify the link to your site in your Mastodon profile
It adds your Mastodon profile to the sameAs structured data we output for your site
The integration allows users to verify the links on their Mastodon profile quickly and easily. Simply switch on the Mastodon integration, add the URL of your profile in Yoast SEO, and add a link to your site on Mastodon itself. After that, refresh your Mastodon page, which should show a green verified link in your profile.
Enter the link to your Mastodon profile on the Site representation section of Yoast SEO
The Schema structured data for Mastodon works automatically. After adding your Mastodon profile in the Yoast SEO settings, we add that link to the structured data graph we generate for your site. We use the same sameAs links for other platforms. This makes it easy for search engines to identify all the other platforms you are active on.
This integration is part of our ongoing commitment to making content creation and distribution as seamless as possible for our users. Our values align with Mastodon’s focus on the open web, user privacy, free speech, and community building. So we’re excited to offer this integration to our users. Try it now!
Also, an Easy Digital Downloads integration
In addition to the Mastodon integration, we’ve added an integration for the popular Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) WordPress plugin. We improved Easy Digital Download’s Schema output for this integration and tied it into the Yoast SEO schema graph. This makes the combination much more robust. You can activate it in the Integrations section of Yoast SEO.
More add-ons integrating with the Yoast SEO Schema API
Improvements to the inclusive language analysis
Over the past months, we’ve worked hard on making our inclusive language analysis as helpful as possible. In Yoast SEO 20.1, we are releasing an improved version of our inclusive language analysis. This latest addition to our collection of SEO tools emphasizes the importance of using language that is inclusive, respectful, and free of bias.
Language is one of the most powerful tools for creating a more inclusive world. With the inclusive language analysis, we want to empower our users to make a positive impact through their writing.
Creating content that resonates with all audiences is essential in today’s rapidly changing and diverse digital landscape. The inclusive language analysis provides real-time feedback on the language used in your content and offers suggestions to help you create more inclusive content.
If you haven’t started using the new and improved inclusive language analysis, try it out now! Help create a more inclusive and respectful digital community for all.
Upgrade now to Yoast SEO 20.1
Two weeks ago, we successfully launched the new settings interface in Yoast SEO 20.0. Reactions have been really positive! Roger Montti of Search Engine Journal said, “I’ve been practicing SEO for almost 25 years, and this version of Yoast is the easiest-to-use SEO plugin I’ve used to date.â€
After releasing that first piece of the puzzle, we are excited to present you with more shortly. But for now, we’re introducing Yoast SEO 20.1 with a new Mastodon integration and improvements to the inclusive language analyses.
We’ve said this time and time again: a fast website is necessary for SEO. In a sea of similarly good (or not-so-good) results, Google will favor fast pages that can deliver a good user experience to searchers. If your goal is to attain higher rankings and drive organic traffic from Google, you need to speed up your WordPress website. In this post, we’ll discuss tips to help you improve your website performance to get that spot in the search results!
Fast websites tend to outperform slow ones on Google because of one good reason – good user experience, and this aligns with Google’s mission. Google wants to deliver the best results and the best experience for their users. Hence, they want to show users web pages that will answer their search queries and provide a good experience. That’s also why page experience is now a ranking factor in Google.
This makes perfect sense when you put it in context. We’ve all had moments where we click on a link only to hit the back button because it takes so long for the page to load. And when we leave a page (or bounce off a page) like that, we’re way less likely to visit the website again because we know there are better, faster pages to browse. So website performance not only affects user experience but also greatly shapes how visitors judge the quality of your business.
That’s why speeding up your WordPress website is beneficial in many ways. A fast site makes your users happy, they’ll engage and buy more on your site. Ultimately, that’ll make you happy. Apart from that, It also makes search engines happy because it’s easier for them to crawl and index your site, thus reducing the resources and electricity they need to spend on those processes.
Don’t I need to focus on Core Web Vitals for SEO?
Yes, we hear you! It’s true that Core Web Vitals is an important part of the page experience ranking factor, and passing Core Web Vitals is essential for higher rankings. Metrics in Core Web Vitals directly measure your page speed, so improving your Core Web Vital scores may result in higher rankings, provided that you have good content already.
While metrics in Core Web Vitals measure the performance of a page, they don’t tell the whole story about your website performance. And Core Web Vitals only measure performance on a page level. So on a site level, you may have pages that pass Core Web Vitals and slower ones in the mix.
By making various improvements to your website performance, you can ensure that your visitors will get the most out of your website regardless of the page they land on. Besides, adopting website optimization best practices also directly benefits your Core Web Vitals and helps to reduce the time spent optimizing pages for speed.
This post is about general guidelines and best practices that will help you speed up your WordPress website. But if you specifically care about getting better CWV scores, check out 5 tips to improve your Core Web Vitals. You will also find a few similar pieces of advice in this post.
How to speed up your WordPress website
Now, WordPress is a simple platform at a first glance, but it’s quite complex under the hood. There are lots of different moving parts, with lots of databases to pull data from when you need to show a page to a user. And when you add lots of pages, media content and install lots of plugins and widgets, your site performance might start to drop.
Fortunately, WordPress is very versatile so there are many things you can do to optimize your performance. Let’s go over some of the tips to help you speed up your site.
1. Choose a great hosting provider and a good hosting plan
Let’s start from the top, having a good hosting provider is crucial for ensuring your website performance. That’s because all your files and databases are stored on their server, which will be called upon when a user requests a page.
A good host will have fast and stable servers. Stable means they have good “uptimeâ€, which essentially means their server is always up and running, ensuring that your website is always accessible. On the other hand, a “fast†server refers to the specification of the computers/machine on which your website lives.
Good hosting providers also offer scalability to handle traffic spikes. A good host will have the resources to accommodate the increased load and ensure that your website remains up and running.
Next to that, customer support quality is another important factor to consider when choosing a host. A good host should provide technical support, which can be invaluable when you encounter any issues with your website. A knowledgeable support team can also help you resolve problems quickly, so you can get back to business as usual.
Another thing to consider is the server location relative to your users. If the server is fast, but it’s located far away from your users, then they might still experience slow-loading pages.
If you’re looking for the best fit when it comes to hostings, we’ve vetted some top-notch hosting companies to help you out.
2. Update your PHP to a newer version
Updating your PHP to a new version is a simple thing to do that often gets overlooked. PHP, or Hypertext Preprocessor, is a popular open-source server-side scripting language widely used for creating dynamic and interactive websites. By using PHP, web developers can build robust, feature-rich websites that can dynamically change based on user interactions, database information, and more
Updating your PHP to the newest version will greatly increase your website performance. You will get:
Improved performance, resulting in faster processing time and reduced resource usage.
Better memory management, which can reduce the amount of memory needed to run your WordPress site, resulting in faster page load times.
Faster request processing, as new versions of PHP are able to process requests more quickly, leading to faster page load times.
Some newer versions of PHP also have improved caching capabilities, allowing for faster page load times and reduced server resource usage.
You can check out endoflife.date to see which PHP version is in development and which version isn’t supported anymore.
Since it’s a server-side scripting language, many hosting providers offer PHP support as part of their hosting packages. If you’re looking to update your PHP, check with your host to see if they can help you with that.
It is important to note that updating PHP can cause compatibility issues with your WordPress plugins and themes. A compatibility issue can cause the website to break, so it is important to make a backup before updating and to test the website after updating to make sure everything works as expected.
3. Update your WordPress version is an easy fix
Advice as old as time! But it does work so we can’t go without mentioning it. You can gain a nice speed boost just by updating your WordPress website to a newer version. You get the latest performance improvements and lots of other optimizations. What’s not to like about that!
WordPress 6.1, for instance, got a bunch of performance improvements under the hood, such as better database performance and better handling of media delivery. On the front end, this results in faster load time for both new and returning visitors.
Additionally, updating to a new WordPress version allows you to run a newer version of PHP, which also gives you all the more performance improvements.
To be cautious, one piece of advice we have is to test an update on a staging environment before you update your live website. See if the update causes issues, check if there are any plugin conflicts, and make sure everything works as intended. You can check the WordPress.org forum or Twitter to see if the update causes issues for others.
4. Implement a caching solution
Caching is an important part of the performance equation. It’s a simple solution that can speed up your WordPress website and make your pages load faster, especially for returning visitors.
Caching refers to the process of storing frequently accessed data in a temporary storage area. Rather than being fetched from the server each time the data is requested, it can be quickly retrieved from the cache when needed.
This helps to reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred between the server and your visitor’s browser, resulting in faster page load times and improved overall website performance. So every time a visitor access a recently-viewed page, the page will be served from the cache instead of having to request all the elements like HTML and images from various databases.
You can rely on caching plugins to do the work for you. For the most part, they’re quite easy to use. Be careful when installing multiple caching or optimization plugins though. They can get in each other’s way, and slow down your site!
Some of our recommendations for caching plugins:
WP Rocket – Very powerful, and one of the best options to make your site faster. Designed to be simple. No free option.
W3 Total Cache – Extremely powerful, and extremely flexible. Designed to be comprehensive. Hundreds of checkboxes and options.
NitroPack – Full page caching with some really clever, cutting-edge performance optimization techniques. Tons of impressive bells and whistles, though the pricing model scales with pageviews.
WP-Optimize – A good middle ground, with basic full-page caching, and some sophisticated database + media optimization tools.
WP Super Cache – A basic solution that offers full page caching, but lacks other/advanced optimization techniques.
These plugin suggestions are derived from our top WordPress plugin recommendations post. There are a lot of good resources to help you build a better WordPress website on that page, so do check it out!
5. Use a lightweight theme
The theme you use greatly impacts how fast your pages load for users. Although WordPress offers a huge selection of themes to play around with, not all themes are created equally.
Some themes are better coded than others. Themes with inefficient or poorly optimized code can slow down page load times and cause you headaches along the way.
Some themes are much leaner than others. You might be drawn to themes with lots of bells and whistles, but be careful. Themes with many images, scripts, and other assets can increase the size of a page and make it slower to load. Sometimes, all you need is simplicity!
For the most part, our advice is to pick a fast and lean theme that’s well-reviewed by the community. They’re your best bet in a sea of choices. Always check the ratings and reviews to see if you’re making the right choice. Even though you can change theme later on, it’s better to just stick with one for a while. That’ll save you troubles that may arise from switching themes.
Apart from themes, many people like to use a page builder to design websites. It’s a great tool for beginners and experienced WordPress users alike. We have the same advice as with theme, that is to choose a popular and well-reviewed one. Some page builders are much lighter and more optimized for speed than others. Elementor, for instance, has done a bunch of work recently to speed up their builder.
6. Deactivate and remove unused plugins
WordPress is a wonderful platform thanks to its plugins and widgets, making it possible to extend a website in many ways. But it can be tempting to install a plugin for every little functionality that you want.
Although plugins can make your life easier, using too many of them is bad for your performance. Since there are more functionalities to load, they make your page load slower.
Really take a look at your plugin collection and asses which ones you need and which you don’t. And instead of using a plugin for every small functionality, use more versatile ones that can do multiple things you need.
For the ones that you don’t need, don’t forget to deactivate and delete them from your site. That’ll remove the additional codes they add to your website. This is an easy fix that may be ignored by some. Besides, unused plugins can cause conflicts with other plugins, themes, and core WordPress functionality. By removing them, you reduce the risk of compatibility issues, which can improve the stability and performance of your site.
7. Optimize your images: a quick fix to speed up your pages
We’ve said this many times, heavy images are detrimental to your page speed. Although eye-catching, high-definition images are a joy to look at, they make your pages much heavier. This means there are more things to process and load, resulting in a slower load time. For instance, having a large, unoptimized hero image above the fold will definitely lead to a low LCP score in Core Web Vitals.
You don’t actually need those high-resolution images. They only need to be sharp enough for everyone to easily make out what’s in them. There’s also a point of diminishing return where higher resolution doesn’t translate to better picture quality. The key is to find a sweet spot between resolution and quality.
Before uploading images to your website, make sure to compress them to reduce the file size. This is especially important if you’re displaying many images on your website or if you’re running an ecommerce website with lots of product images.
We recommend Compress JPEG & PNG images or Optimole to compress, optimize and manage your images. Squoosh.app is another great tool that we use to compress the social image of our posts, which is shown when our posts are shared on social media.
Want to go in-depth into image optimization? Check out our comprehensive image SEO guide!
8. Optimize your media delivery
The way you serve media content to end users can greatly impact your page speed, too. It’s crucial that you optimize and make tweaks to how your website delivers media content.
Lazy-loading is a popular technique that a lot of websites implement. It tells your user’s browser to load images only when they are needed, rather than loading them all at once when a page loads. Luckily WordPress does this natively so you can use that feature right out of the box. In addition, WordPress 6.1 also received a nice media delivery improvement, which is great for websites with lots of images. But even with all these features available, it’s still best to only add images when they are necessary.
As for videos, they can be useful in driving search traffic to your website. But we strongly advise you not to host videos directly on your server. They are heavy and can take up a lot of your server storage. Self-hosted videos will also make pages load slower, which is not what you want for SEO.
A better choice is to host videos on a video hosting platform like Youtube or Wistia and embed a link on your page. Next to that, make sure to use a process to show a preview image, and only load the video on interaction.
We also have a solution for optimizing videos for SEO – our Yoast Video SEO plugin! It adds the necessary structured data to videos on your website so Google can show them in rich snippets. The plugin will also supercharge your videos so they load more efficiently. If videos are an important part of your website and your SEO strategy, you need to use Yoast Video SEO!
9. Use a content delivery network
Content delivery networks (CDNs) won’t let you down when it comes to speeding up your WordPress website. It is incredibly important if you serve overseas users or those who live far away from your original web server.
A CDN is an interconnected network of servers working together to deliver content to your end users. They make copies of your static content like images or HTML files and distribute them on all the servers within the network. So instead of serving images or HTML files directly from your original servers, those files will be sent from the server closets to your users.
On the left: traffic to your site lands on a single server. On the right, a CDN sends visitors to the server nearest to their location. Image: Wikipedia
As we explain in our guide to CDNs, the same ‘do your own research’ principles apply here, too. You’ll need to find the best mix of performance, features, and price.
We’re huge fans of Cloudflare at Yoast (which we use to power all sorts of our own ecosystems), but it may not be the perfect fit for you.
When you’re choosing a CDN for WordPress, it’s worth making sure that they have a good plugin integration, so that page and resource caches are automatically updated or purged as you write or update your content (like the Cloudflare WordPress plugin).
10. Use fewer external scripts and optimize your JavasScript
A note before we go further: this section is a bit more advanced compared to the other advice in this post. It’s best not to tamper with any JavaScript if you’re new to website building, or if you don’t have any development experience. Instead, play it safe and ask an experienced developer to help you out with JavaScript tweaks and optimizations.
With that said, JavaScript is a wonderful language and allows us to do a lot of things on websites. It makes websites more dynamic and enjoyable for end users to use.
When you see animations on a website, like when you click a button and something pops up, that’s most likely thanks to JavaScript. For website owners, it allows them to add analytics tools like Google Analytics or Hotjar and do cool things like A/B testing or personalization.
But using too much JavaScript and external scripts makes a page load much slower. Loading external scripts can slow down the performance of your website, as the browser has to make additional requests to retrieve the scripts. We often see this on web pages with many external ads, which can be frustrating at times. By minimizing the number of external scripts, you can reduce the amount of data that needs to be loaded and improve page load times.
Too much JavaScript can also affect your crawl budget. That’s because Google needs to render these files while indexing, which takes up resources. The more resources Google needs to spend on processing those files, the less they have to come back and crawl other pages on your site.
There are many ways to reduce the amount of JavaScript you use, which greatly depends on your website and the type of scripts. Start by finding out what’s loading. Then you can decide to not load it, or change how it loads to make it load more efficiently by implementing defer or async loading.
Avoid loading stuff from external domains, like Google Fonts or resources from CDNs, and load local copies instead. Also, ask yourself if you can get the same result by using a different method than using a script. For example, you can use CSS instead of a script for animation.
11. Reduce files size
We mentioned that you can compress your images to reduce their file size. You can do the same with your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, too.
Although the number of bytes and kilobytes you shaved off these files doesn’t sound like much, they can add up. One way to reduce file size is to reduce the redundant spacing or lines in your code. You can also combine multiple files into a single file, compress it and still serve that file without breaking your site.
Tampering with codes never sounds like a great idea, especially if you’re not a developer. But thankfully we have plugins to help us out. You can check out:
Autoptimize, which has some really clever JavaScript, CSS, and HTML optimization.
WP Minify, which also allows you to combine and compress JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files.
12. Reduce HTTP requests to your server
Every time a user clicks on a link to visit your website, their browser has to make multiple HTTP requests to your web server asking for various files and data. The server has to process these requests and send back all the necessary files so the browser can render them and show the page to the user.
Reducing the amount of HTTP requests here basically means reducing the number of files the server has to retrieve and send to your user’s browser. That will help with decreasing the amount of data transferred and decreasing the load on your server, as well as making it easier for the browser to render and construct a page.
If you’ve already implemented all the tips we mentioned above, then you’re already removing quite a bit of unnecessary HTTP requests. That involves using fewer plugins and scripts, including fewer media files, implementing a caching solution, and using a CDN to serve static content.
Wrapping up
Congratulations on making this far into the post! We hope this post will be useful in helping you speed up your WordPress website. We know there’s a lot of information here, so do take some time to process and digest it.
By implementing the techniques and best practices we suggest, you’ll be on your way to building a fast and snappy website! Don’t forget to document the changes you make and evaluate the impact on your website’s search presence, organic traffic, as well as overall website performance.
When every millisecond can make the difference between a visitor buying or leaving, there’s always more room for performance optimization. We regularly review the setup and configuration of our hosting, CDN, plugins, and theme – and so should you.
Got a great recommendation for speeding up WordPress or other site speed tools? Let us know in the comments!
More resources to help you speed up your WordPress website
These articles and documentation can provide more information on website speed optimization. Have a read!
The meta description summarizes a page’s content and presents that to users in the search results. It’s one of the first things people will likely see when searching for something, so optimizing it is crucial for SEO. It’s your chance to persuade users to click on your result! This post will show you the characteristics of a good meta description and how Yoast SEO can help you get it right.
The meta description is an HTML tag you can set for a post or page of your website. In it, you can use roughly 155 characters to describe what your page is about. If you’re lucky, Google will show it beneath your page’s title in the search results. It allows you to convince search engine users that your page will offer what they are looking for.
In Google’s search results, this is where it can be displayed:
A meta description from yoast.com, as seen in the search results
And this is what it looks like in the HTML code of the page:
<meta name="description" content="Do you want people to click on your search result? Learn how to write the best meta description. Including 7 characteristics and examples!" />
Why set a meta description?
The purpose of a meta description is simple: it needs to get someone searching with a search term on Google to click your link. In other words, meta descriptions are there to generate click-throughs from search engines.
Search engines say there is no direct SEO benefit from the meta description – they don’t use it in their ranking algorithm. But there is an indirect benefit: Google uses click-through-rate (CTR) to determine whether you’re a good result. If more people click on your result, Google considers you to be a good result and will – based on your position – move you up the rankings. This is why optimizing your meta description is important, as is optimizing your titles.
In this Yoast SEO academy video, Fleur will explain how titles and meta description help increase your visibility on Google:
What does a good meta description contain?
Here’s a list of elements you need to write a good meta description:
Keep it up to 155 characters
Use an active voice and make it actionable
Include a call to action
Use your focus keyphrase
Show specifications when needed
Make sure it matches the content of the page
Make it unique
Let’s go over them in detail!
1. Keep it up to 155 characters
The right length doesn’t exist; it depends on the message you want to convey. You should take enough space to convey the message but keep it short and snappy. However, if you check the search results in Google, you’ll mostly see snippets of 120 to 156 characters, like in the example below. Google says you can make your meta descriptions as long as you want, but there is a limit to what we can see in the SERPs — and that’s around 155 characters; anything longer will get truncated.
This search result from a Yoast SEO user shows a succinct meta description in Google
Unfortunately, you can’t fully control what Google displays in the search results. Sometimes it shows the meta description, and sometimes it just grabs some sentences of your copy. Either way, your best bet is to keep it short. That way, if Google does decide to show the description you’ve written, it won’t be cut short.
2. Use active voice and make it actionable
If you see the meta description as an invitation to visit your page, you have to think about your user and their (possible) motivation to visit your page. Make sure that your description isn’t dull, difficult, or too cryptic. People need to know what they can expect to find on your page.
The example in the image below is the description you should strive to write. It’s active, it speaks to you and addresses you directly. You know what you’ll get if you click on the link!
Make people want to click your search result
3. Include a call-to-action
“Hello, we have such and such new product, and you want it. Find out more!†This overlaps with what we said about the active voice, but we wanted to emphasize it again. The meta description is your sales text. Except, in this case, the “product†you are trying to sell is the page that is linked. Invitations like Learn more, Get it now, Try for free come in handy, and we use them too.
Get people to click on your link
4. Use your focus keyword
If the search keyword matches a part of the text in the meta description, Google will be more inclined to use it and highlight it in the search results. This will make the link to your site even more inviting. Google sometimes even highlights synonyms. In the example below, both the Academy Awards and Oscars are highlighted. Getting your results emphasized like that makes them stand out even more.
A listing for the Academy Awards on Google
5. Show specifications, where possible
If you have a product in your Shopify or WooCommerce store aimed at the tech-savvy, it can be a good idea to focus on the technical specs. For example, you can include the manufacturer, SKU, price, etc. If the visitor is specifically looking for that product, you won’t have to convince them. Can the watch help us stay fit? Sign us up; that’s all we need to know. Note that to optimize your result in this manner, you should work on getting rich snippets.
Make it spark
6. Make sure it matches the content of the page
This is an important one. Google will find out if you use the meta descriptions to trick visitors into clicking on your result. They might even penalize you if you do it. But besides that, misleading descriptions will also increase your bounce rate. Which will also lower people’s trust in your company. It’s a bad idea for that reason alone. That is why you want the meta description to match the content on the page.
7. Make it unique
Adding the date to the snippet preview
People often ask questions about the date shown in the Google preview of our Yoast SEO plugin. We’ve added this because search engines may display a date with your snippet. So it’s important to factor it in when you decide on the right length of your meta description. Unfortunately, there’s no way to directly control whether this date is shown or not, but you can try to manage the dates they use in the search results.
If your meta description is the same as those for other pages, the user experience in Google will be hampered. Although your page titles might vary, all pages will appear to be the same because all the descriptions are the same. Instead of creating duplicate meta descriptions, you’d better leave them blank. Google will pick a snippet from the page containing the keyword used in the query. That being said, writing a unique meta description for every page you want to rank with is always the best practice.
How Yoast SEO helps you write meta descriptions
Adding a meta description is easy if you’re on WordPress or Shopify and using Yoast SEO. Firstly, you can write it in the Google preview section of Yoast SEO. But Yoast SEO also gives you feedback on it in the SEO analysis. The plugin checks the meta description length and whether you’ve used your focus keyphrase. So let’s see how the plugin helps you and what you can do with it.
You can edit your meta description in Yoast SEO
You can edit your meta description in Yoast SEO for Shopify
What does the keyphrase in meta description assessment in Yoast SEO do?
This check is all about using the keyphrase in the meta description. A focus keyphrase is the search term you want a page to rank with. When people use that term, you want them to find your page. You base your keyphrase on keyword research. After your research, you should end up with a combination of words that most of your audience is most likely to search for. We’ve already discussed that when you use your keyphrase in the meta description, Google will likely highlight it. That makes it easier for people to see that they’ve found what they are looking for.
Yoast SEO checks if and how often you use the words from your focus keyphrase in the meta description text. In addition, if you use Yoast SEO Premium, it also takes into account the synonyms you enter. If you overdo it, the plugin advises you to limit the use of your focus keyphrase.
What a green bullet looks like in Yoast SEO
What a green bullet looks like in Yoast SEO for Shopify
How to get a green traffic light for the keyphrase in meta description
If you don’t mention the keyphrase in the meta description at all, you’ll get a red traffic light. So, make sure to write one. But don’t stuff your meta description with your keyphrase, because that will also get you a red traffic light. And make sure to mention all the words from your keyphrase near to each other. Search engines are pretty smart nowadays, but you still need to make it clear what your page is about.
Yoast SEO Premium plugin takes the synonyms you’ve added into account when it performs its analysis. This allows you to write more naturally and will result in a text that’s a more pleasant read. Moreover, it’s easier to score a green traffic light this way. Use it to your advantage!
Unlock all features in Yoast SEO Premium
Save time on your SEO and get access to all of our SEO courses.
What does the meta description length assessment do?
This meta description length assessment measures whether your description is too short (less than 120 characters) or too long (more than 156 characters). When your meta description has the right length, you’ll get a green traffic light. If it’s too long, or too short, you’ll get an orange traffic light in the SEO analysis of Yoast SEO (or red, if you’ve marked your article as cornerstone content).
What the check looks like in the Yoast SEO meta box
A green bullet in the Yoast SEO for Shopify app
How to write a concise meta description
A good meta description convinces people that your page offers the best result to their query. But, to be the best result, you must know what people are looking for. What is their search intent? Are they looking for an answer to a question? If they are, try to give them the most complete answer. Are they looking for a product? Write down what makes your product stand out and why they would best buy it in your store. Be concise and convincing!
You get real-time feedback on the meta description length in the Google preview section in the Yoast SEO sidebar or meta box. If you want to write a meta description, click on “Google preview” in the Yoast SEO sidebar. This will open the snippet editor and you’ll see input fields to edit the SEO title, the slug and the meta description. When you start typing in the meta description input field, the snippet preview at the top of the Google preview editor will immediately show your new text. Underneath the input field, there is a bar. It’s orange when you start typing and will become green when you’ve added enough information. When you add too much text, it will turn orange again.
The bar will change color when your go over the limit
Checking the Google preview in Yoast SEO for Shopify
Writing or editing your meta description in the Yoast SEO meta box underneath your post editor is also possible. Just go to the SEO tab in the meta box (if it’s not on this tab by default), and you can start typing in the field under Meta description right away.
What to do if you need meta descriptions for a lot of pages?
Does it feel like you need to change all your meta descriptions after reading this? But not sure how to fit that into your schedule? Google has the answer:
“If you don’t have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content; at the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.“
You can check which of your pages rank highest with Google Search Console. Take it from there. Additionally, it’s also possible to optimize your meta descriptions with variables in Yoast SEO. This allows you to speed up this process without having to worry about duplicate descriptions.
If you prefer to write a unique description for each page and have a lot to get through, you can use the Bulk editor tool in Yoast SEO for WordPress. Head to the Tools page, click on ‘Bulk editor’, and then select the ‘Description’ tab. You’ll be able to see any meta descriptions already set for your pages, and you can quickly add new ones without having to open each page individually. However, with this tool, you won’t get warnings if your description is too short/long, or if the focus keyword is missing.
Meta descriptions for social sharing
Do you have Yoast SEO? In that case: check the Facebook and Twitter preview in the Yoast SEO sidebar or social tab in the Yoast SEO meta box below your post or page. You can add a separate description for your social media channels there. In Yoast SEO Premium, you even have social previews that show you what your post or page will look like when shared on social media.
We are thrilled to announce the release of Yoast SEO 20.0. This release features a brand-new, state-of-the-art settings interface that takes your SEO work to the next level. We took great care to design an interface that’s logical and easy while simultaneously fully featured. This user interface brings Yoast SEO ahead of the curve and prepares us for a bright future!
Meet your new SEO best friend
With Yoast SEO, we’ve always focused on building the best WordPress SEO plugin out there. We worked on the features first while forgetting the experience for a bit. So a new interface for Yoast SEO was a long time coming.
It’s not hard to give an interface a new coat of paint, but thoroughly rebuilding it from the ground up is a lot of work. It means rethinking what goes where, what we want to be able to do in the future, and what this all should look like. Luckily, we pulled it off!
The new user interface we introduce in Yoast SEO 20.0
A better interface for you and us
We’ve worked hard to bring you this great new setting UI for Yoast SEO. For us, it’s the end of an era and the beginning of a beautiful future. This new interface makes it much easier for us to incorporate new features and improve Yoast SEO while giving you a modern experience that is a joy to use.
Joost de Valk, the founder of Yoast, explains: “We felt that the default WordPress admin design no longer suited us. Our product team was itching to take our experience to the next level. WordPress’s interface was holding us back a bit, as the admin interface outside Gutenberg hasn’t progressed for years.â€
“I’m proud of what the team has built in the Yoast SEO 20.0 release,†says Thijs de Valk, CEO of Yoast. “Our team wanted to do this, and they delivered. It is a technically outstanding change and proves we are constantly improving and optimizing. Our new user interface shows we’ll keep delivering the best possible experience to our users. A very exciting first step in 2023!â€
A logical structure for settings in Yoast SEO 20.0
The first thing you’ll notice about the new interface is its sleek, modern look and streamlined navigation. The new sidebar lets you quickly and easily access all essential settings and features without navigating multiple pages or menus. We’ve even added a search feature to find everything you need in a jiffy.
We reshuffled the contents of the old settings and divided them into four main sections:
General:
Site features: here, you can easily switch specific features on and off, from the different analyses to IndexNow and the XML sitemaps.
Site basics: in this section, you can find the basic information about your site, like the name and tagline of the website, plus force rewrite options and the like.
Site representation: this section contains information about your site that helps search engines understand it better through Schema structured data, like if the site represents a person or an organization and which names, logos, and social media accounts are associated.
Site connections: here, you can connect the different search engine tools to your site, like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Content types:
Here, you’ll find your site’s settings for each content type. You can determine how each should appear in search, what it should look like on social media, and what types of Schema structured data describe this content best.
Categories and tags:
Same as the content types, except this is for your taxonomies.
Advanced:
Here, you’ll find features like the Crawl optimization settings in Yoast SEO Premium. Plus breadcrumbs options, plus settings for various archives and special pages.
Individual feature settings pages
One of the most significant changes in Yoast SEO 20.0 is the new, intuitive layout of all the individual settings pages. Each setting now has a clear and concise explanation, making it easy to understand what it does and how to use it. The new interface also includes insightful links to give you more context on optimizing your website for search engines. This makes it much more user-friendly for those who are new to SEO.
Like a breath of fresh air
Yoast SEO 20.0 is a game changer
Overall, Yoast SEO 20.0 is a major step forward in developing the plugin, and we are confident that it will help you achieve your SEO goals more easily. The new interface is cleaner, more intuitive, and user-friendly. It’s now easier than ever for you to optimize your website for search engines. We are excited for you to start using the new interface and see it for yourself.
Thank you for choosing Yoast SEO. We look forward to helping you improve your website’s rankings with our new, super-modern settings interface. And remember, this is only the beginning!
So you want to write more inclusively? Great! That means more people will feel welcome when they read your content, and you won’t accidentally exclude them. But if that’s not enough reason, just think how many more people will engage with your content if you involve them and make your content relatable to them! So, what does inclusive language look like? We’re here to give you some examples.
Let’s look at an example of non-inclusive writing first. We’ve bolded the non-inclusive word:
I was just on my way to the grocery store when a group of seniors decided to visit too. At first, I was worried I’d have to stand in line for ages. But as I walked in, I got to talking with one of the women. She was very lovely, and explained they were actually here to do some volunteering!
The bolded word could be potentially harmful to older adults, unless they actually use these words to refer to themselves. Here’s what you could do to write more inclusively:
I was just on my way to the grocery store when a group of older people decided to visit too. At first, I was worried I’d have to stand in line for ages. But as I walked in, I got to talking with one of the women. She was very lovely, and explained they were here to actually do some volunteering!
As you can see, a few minor changes to the text can already make a difference. And it isn’t that much of an effort to make the text relatable to a larger group of people.
Inclusive language example: appearance
You probably know the famous saying: don’t judge a book by its cover. Whatever a person looks like, you shouldn’t judge them based on their appearance. Especially when that judgment is based on prejudices.
Here’s an example of non-inclusive writing. We’ve bolded the non-inclusive word:
We’d booked a hotel near the sea, so we visited the beach every day. Both locals and tourists seemed to love this beach. And we highly recommend it too! If you’re insecure about your body, don’t worry. Both fat people and thin people came to enjoy the sun at this beach.
There’s something called an ‘anti-fat bias‘, also known as fatphobia. This occurs when people are judged or mistreated for having a weight higher than what is perceived as “standard”. To avoid reinforcing this bias, it’s good to pay attention to your language when talking about people’s weight. In general, avoiding commenting on people’s weight unless it’s relevant to the topic. If it is relevant, avoid using “fat” unless you are referring to someone who prefers that term to describe their appearance.
So let’s look at the same text but with an inclusive word:
We’d booked a hotel near the sea, so we visited the beach every day. Both locals and tourists seemed to love this beach. And we highly recommend it too! If you’re insecure about your body, don’t worry. Both people who have a higher weight and a lower weight came to enjoy the sun at this beach.
Before we move onto the next category, let’s do one more example. We’ve bolded the non-inclusive word:
My day was good! I actually got a new colleague who’s going to work on the renovation project with me. He’s a midget, and overall a really nice guy.
Ah, the “m” word. It’s never been an official term to identify people with dwarfism. Rather, it’s been used to put people of short stature on display and nowadays, it’s considered a derogatory slur. So here’s the same text with an inclusive word instead:
My day was good! I actually got a new colleague who’s going to work on the renovation project with me. He has a short stature, and he’s overall a really nice guy.
Inclusive language example: race, culture, and ethnicity
When you think about inclusive language, this category is probably top of mind. And while the topic has gained popularity over the years, it’s always good to be extra mindful of your language. You don’t want to maintain a bias toward people based on their race, ethnicity, country of origin, or culture.
Let’s look at an example of non-inclusive writing. We’ve bolded the non-inclusive words:
If you want to travel around the world, we only have one thing to say: do it! It’s truly an amazing experience. We always recommend people to visit East Asia, because it’s a stunning region. If you decide to visit Japan, we highly recommend Tanaka’s curry house in Osaka. It’s run by a lovely oriental couple. But don’t write off third world countries when you’re planning your trip! They are very gorgeous too.
First of all, you shouldn’t use a word like ‘oriental’, because it’s othering towards Asian people. What’s othering? In the simplest terms, it’s pointing a finger at someone and saying you are different. Which is obviously bad. And second, don’t use the word ‘third world’. You might not realize it, but it’s very derogatory.
Here’s what you should write instead:
If you want to travel around the world, we only have one thing to say: do it! It’s truly an amazing experience. We always recommend people to visit East Asia, because it’s a stunning region. If you decide to visit Japan, we highly recommend Tanaka’s curry house in Osaka. It’s run by a lovely Japanese couple.But don’t write off low-incomecountries! They are very gorgeous too.
Inclusive language example: disability and neurodiversity
Telling a wheelchair user to ‘walk it off’ can be very insensitive. But that’s exactly what you do when you don’t take disability and neurodiversity into account when writing. And be aware that some disabilities aren’t always visible!
First, the non-inclusive example. We’ve bolded the non-inclusive words:
Our company has some crazy benefits for its employees. And if it isn’t sorted, just say the word and we’ll fix it for you. Nothing will fall on deaf ears! And we support the disabled too. Because we want everyone to feel welcome!
Using words like ‘crazy’ or ‘insane’ has become pretty common in our society. But it can minimize or trivialize the experiences of people who have a particular condition or symptom. So take care to avoid these types of words.
Let’s look at what you should write instead:
Our company has some amazing benefits for its employees. And if it isn’t sorted, just say the word and we’ll fix it for you. Nothing won’t be addressed! And we support people with disabilities too. Because we want everyone to feel welcome!
Do note that neurodiverse people and disabled people may prefer different approaches to how they want to be described. There are generally two: person-first language (PFL), and identity-first language (IFL). It’s the difference between ‘person with a disability’ or ‘disabled person’. You can learn more about PFL and IFL on our help page. And don’t hesitate to ask people what they prefer!
Inclusive language example: gender
When we talk about writing inclusively, this also means looking out for gendered words. ‘Man-hours’ is a very obvious example, as is simply using ‘he/him’ to refer to people in general. We also call the latter male bias.
Let’s look at a non-inclusive example. We’ve bolded the non-inclusive words:
If you’re looking for your next read, look no further. We’ve got an awesome list of books that both men and women will love. These titles are truly some of mankind’s best novels. And as part of our inclusivity campaign, we also included books that center transgenders.
A great thing to remember is that neither gender nor sex is inherently binary. There are more gender identities than men and women, such as genderfluid and non-binary people. In addition, there are also people with no gender, such as agender and some non-binary people.
Here’s the same text, but written inclusively:
If you’re looking for your next read, look no further. We’ve got an awesome list of books that everyone will love. These titles are truly some of humanity’s best novels. And as part of our inclusivity campaign, we also included books that centertransgender people.
Inclusive language example: socioeconomic status
When you write about topics that center around income, education, occupation, and social class, you might want to pay extra attention to what words you use. You don’t want to alienate or harm parts of your audience by being non-inclusive. The key is to try and be as specific as possible.
Here’s a non-inclusive example. We’ve bolded the non-inclusive words:
Hubert was a truly remarkable man. He dedicated his life to helping others. As an ex-offender, he knew how bad life could get. That’s why he frequently organized fundraisers for the poor and homeless. In addition, he volunteered at soup kitchens and provided care packages for illegal immigrants.
As we said, when writing about income or housing, try to be as specific as possible. Don’t overgeneralize. As for the term ‘illegal immigrants’, it’s not only harmful but also inaccurate. And finally, don’t reduce people to their experiences with the criminal justice system. That’s dehumanizing.
Let’s look at the same text but with inclusive words:
Hubert was a truly remarkable man. He dedicated his life to helping others. As a person with felony convictions, he knew how bad life could get. That’s why he frequently organized fundraisers for individuals with low income and people who are homeless. In addition, he volunteered at soup kitchens and provided care packages for undocumented people.
Inclusive language example: sexual and romantic orientation
Before we dive into the example, let’s quickly get on the same page. Sexual orientation is who you experience sexual attraction to, and romantic orientation is who you feel romantically attracted to. It’s also important to keep in mind that not everyone is comfortable with certain labels. Some people describe themselves as bisexual, while others might prefer queer or simply no label at all.
Here’s an example with non-inclusive words. We’ve bolded what is not inclusive:
When we visited Amsterdam, we had no idea it was Pride Amsterdam. There was a canal parade that we attended, which was really awesome. There were rainbows everywhere. And it was great to see so many homosexuals and lesbians celebrating who they are. We even got to dance and sing along. It was fun!
First things first: Don’t use the word homosexual. It’s often considered derogatory because of its clinical associations. Next, you should be careful with assumptions. Assuming everyone at pride is gay or a lesbian is an overgeneralization, and probably wrong. You’d be excluding a lot of other sexual and romantic identities. That’s why it might be better to use descriptions instead of labels, unless someone tells you what label they prefer of course.
Here’s one way of writing the previous text more inclusively. We’ve bolded the changes we made:
When we visited Amsterdam, we had no idea it was Pride Amsterdam. There was a canal parade that we attended, which was really awesome. There were rainbows everywhere. And it was great to see so many gay people, lesbians and other people belonging to the LGBTQ+ community celebrating who they are. We even got to dance and sing along. It was fun!
Make it easier for yourself
Now that we’ve gone over every category, you might feel a little overwhelmed. And we get it. It’s a lot to remember all at once. That’s why we’ve introduced the inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO. How does it work? Simply write your text, and the analysis feature will assess your post. You’ll get valuable feedback to help you improve your content, so your posts and pages will appeal to a wider audience. Meaning: You don’t have to Google everything!
The inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO
Don’t be afraid to ask
Good job, you! By reading this post, you’ve taken the first step into writing more inclusively. And while you might not get it right straight away, it’s good that you’re trying. So keep doing that! And don’t be afraid to ask people about their identities, and learn from them. Because inclusive language is here to stay.
