Are you aiming for that number 1 position in the search results? And do you madly chase traffic and clicks? It’s not easy to achieve all these things on your own. Luckily, Yoast is here to help. In this post, we’ll talk you through optimizing your post in the best possible way. We’ll explain the five steps on how to Yoast your post.
Writing comes first, Yoast comes second
Optimizing your post is important, but it should never come first. Writing has three phases:
Prepare your content
Write!
Edit your content (and Yoast it!)
It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a blog post, an article, or novel. The steps are all the same.
Preparation is key
Before you start writing an article, you should be able to answer the following questions:
In other words, you should take some time to think about what you want to tell your audience and what the structure of your text will look like. You need to know who you’re writing for and what their goal or search intent is. And what keywords does your audience use, so your content can be found in the search engines?
If you do not think about these questions long and hard, you’ll make mistakes like addressing the wrong audience, focusing on the wrong keywords or writing an article that’s badly structured and unfocused.
Write!
After thoroughly preparing your blog post or article, you can start writing. Make sure to start by filling out your focus keyphrases and their synonyms. What are the terms you want to be found for?
Since you’ve thought about what you’ll write in the preparation phase, you should go with the flow when you’re writing. Don’t overthink. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. You’ll have the third – and most important phase- to correct and Yoast your post.
Editing: let’s Yoast it!
In the final editing phase, you can Yoast your post. So, let’s look at the five steps you should take to optimize your post to the max.
Make sure your text is readable
The first step in optimizing your post is checking the readability analysis. If your overall readability score is green, you’re good to go. But that’s not always the case! Perhaps you used too many long sentences. Maybe you’ve used the passive voice too often. Correct those readability issues and make your text nice and easy to read. Check out our article about the readability analysis for more tips!
Check out your snippet preview
You want people to click on your site in the search result pages. You need to write a kickass meta description to make your result stand out. Because a good meta description lets people know they’ll find what they’re looking for on your site! That’s why you should choose a title and a meta description that stands out. Read our article on how to use Yoast SEO to write an awesome meta description if you want more practical tips.
If you need more help writing awesome meta descriptions, try the meta description generator. Our AI-powered generator crafts unique descriptions and titles for you! This feature is currently available if you have our premium Yoast SEO plugin.
Check your SEO score
The third step is to check out the SEO analysis. Which aspects of your SEO need improvement? Perhaps you should use your keyword or its synonym more often. Or maybe you’re overdoing it. And what about headings and images?
Check out which problems and improvements the Yoast SEO analysis indicates. Usually, you can easily make some tweaks that’ll make your copy better optimized for search engines. But don’t overdo it! You do not need all green traffic lights. You’re good to go if your overall SEO traffic light is green!
Add those internal links
Another thing you need before your content can rank is links. Google finds your posts and pages best when linked to from somewhere on the web. Internal links also connect your content and give Google an idea of the structure of your website. So, using the right internal linking strategy can boost your SEO!
Are you linking to your most important articles? Are you linking to articles that are closely related to the article you’re currently writing? Make sure your site structure is tip-top. Read more about the power of internal linking and why you should use Yoast internal linking.
Read and reread!
Yoast SEO is a tool that aims to help you optimize your content. It gives practical tips on what you can do to improve your content. Think of it as your personal SEO assistant! But that being said, it’s also just a tool. Make sure to re-read your content once you’ve optimized it to make sure you’re happy with the end result!
Yoast your post
Writing is hard. Optimizing your post all by yourself is hard. That’s why Yoast SEO tries to make it easier for you! We’ll check your posts for readability, paragraph length, word complexity, your use of inclusive language, and make suggestions for improvements. We’ll help you to Yoast your post. But in the end, it will also remain some work from your side.
SEO copywriting is a crucial component of any successful SEO strategy. Still, it can also present a significant challenge for anyone wanting to create high-quality content that ranks well in search engines. As search engines crawl web pages, the content of your website should be fine-tuned to the — ever-changing — algorithms of search engines. In addition to that, write clearly so that your audience both enjoys and understands your website. After all, we know that readability ranks.
This complete guide to SEO copywriting takes you through the process of keyword research and the different stages of the writing process. It will also help you write the readable and SEO-friendly articles your website needs! And last but not least, we’ll give you some insights into creating SEO content for international sites and the challenges that come with that.
This guide to writing SEO content covers the following:
At Yoast, we practice what we call ‘holistic SEO’. Our primary goal should be to build and maintain THE BEST possible website. Ranking in Google will come easier if your website is exceptionally high quality and your content is unique and helpful. The reason for that: Google wants to serve its customers what they want. Their mission is: to index all the world’s information and make it universally accessible.
In addition to this, Google, of course, wants to make money, but they’ll have to show people the results they are looking for – otherwise, people will stop using Google. We can agree that Google wants to show people the best results. If your website is the best in your niche market, Google wants to rank it high in the results.
What is SEO copywriting?
SEO copywriting is one of the most powerful tools people use to get ahead of their competition. By creating high-quality content that’s carefully optimized for search engines and tailored to the needs and interests of their target audience, people can increase their visibility, drive more organic traffic to their website, and ultimately grow their revenue.
It’s like the perfect blend of art and science, where a little creative flair and strategic optimization techniques can work wonders for your online presence. Whether you’re a small business just starting or a larger enterprise looking to dominate your industry, SEO copywriting can help you succeed in the search result pages.
Holistic SEO
Holistic SEO is an interdisciplinary marketing strategy to make the best website in a niche market. To do so, the technical design of your website should be excellent, the UX of your website flawless, and all security aspects covered. Most important, however, is that the content of your website should be well-written, appropriately marketed, and targeted at the audience your website serves. This approach requires relatively advanced SEO writing skills.
To ensure your website is the best in your sector, the text on your website should be easy to read. Without making any concessions to the quality of your SEO content, you should tweak and fine-tune your text to the specific demands of search engines. SEO copywriting is very much like the process of writing anything else, so it’s hard work, and inevitably, some of us have more writing talent than others. Unfortunately, we can’t all be Ernest Hemingway, but anyone can write better SEO copy with some training.
Generative AI is like a machine that can effortlessly create content for SEO purposes. It can be trained to analyze keywords and other factors to generate new and optimize existing content. However, we must remember that the human touch is still vital in ensuring that the generated content is of good quality, without factual errors, and relevant to a target audience.
Due to the design of its technology, you must also remember that generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Google Bard can not give you original writing yet — but it is very good at reusing stuff already out there. Still, it cannot come up with things itself.
Generative AI will be a handy tool for creating SEO content in the future. However, it’s essential to use it wisely and ensure the content meets brand guidelines and target audience needs. Please use generative AI responsibly. Use AI as a guide, not as a fully automated content factory.
Before writing: always start with keyword research
The very first step of SEO copywriting has little to do with writing. First, you need to decide what you’re going to write about. Which topics do you want to be found for? You’ll need to use the keywords you want to rank for in your copy, so keyword research is the first step of SEO copywriting. Keyword research is what you do to list the keywords and keyphrases for which you want to rank for.
Proper keyword research consists of these three steps:
1. Formulate a mission statement
Before starting the actual keyword research, think about your mission statement. This is what makes you stand out from the crowd. While formulating your mission statement, consider who you are and what your blog is about. What makes it unique? Take your time to develop and write down your mission statement. For more information on creating mission statements, read our post on how to write a mission statement for your website.
2. Make a list of relevant keywords
Once you have formulated a clear mission statement, you can start listing all the search terms (keywords) you want your website to be found for. If your mission is clear, you should be able to develop search terms that apply to your niche market and your unique selling points. These will be the keywords you’d like to be found for.
To come up with good terms, you have to get inside the heads of your audience. How are they most likely to find you? What would they search for on Google? At the end of your keyword research, you should have a list of all the relevant search terms people might use. Also, think of combinations and variations of these terms. You can also use tools to help you in the keyword research process. For example, Yoast SEO integrates with the Semrush related keywords research tool. After you’ve made a list, you may have trouble deciding which keyphrase to use. If so, read our post about choosing your perfect focus keyword.
Create an overview
Eventually, you should have a helpful overview, which will significantly help your SEO copywriting process. It helps to create a table of your keywords to summarize the information. Try to devise combinations of keywords, then order the keywords by some priority. Which keywords are essential to rank for and closest to your mission statement, and which are less so? When choosing which keywords to tackle, you should also consider how likely your pages will rank for that specific keyword. Focusing on less popular and less competitive keywords can be a good strategy at first. Please read our posts about why you should focus on long-tail keywords if you’d like to know more about the importance of less competitive keywords.
3. Look at search intent
Nowadays, SEO strategies should largely revolve around answering people’s questions. Whenever someone enters a search query into a search engine, they are on a quest for something. There are four kinds of intent searchers can have:
Informational intent: to find information on a specific topic.
Navigational intent: to access a specific website by entering the term in a search engine.
Commercial intent: to buy something sometime soon and research before purchasing.
Transactional intent: to buy something after doing their commercial intent searches.
In your keyword research, you need to find out which kinds of intent apply to your keywords and try to match these search intents. You can use the search results to determine which intent applies to your keywords and create great content matching this intent. Which intent you’re targetting should also affect your writing style; we’ll go into that later in this guide.
4. Create landing pages for searchers
The final step of keyword research is to create awesome posts or pages for the keywords you want to be found for. The SEO content should be tailored to attract visitors who found your blog through a specific keyword. This could be a dedicated page or a blog post optimized for a specific keyword. Ensure visitors can navigate your blog through the menu or internal links. And make sure you have a page for every relevant keyword you come up with.
If you’ve found an excellent format for these kinds of posts or pages, you can use Yoast Duplicate Post to use that format for similar pages. With it, you can clone a post and easily fill it with the content your page will be about.
Your keyword research will give you a good idea of what to blog about. Then, you’ll have to unlock content around a specific word. A word is not a topic, though. Next to a keyword (or keyphrase), you will need an angle, a specific story around that keyword. Read our tips on coming up with ideas for your blog if you want to know more.
Three phases of writing an article
Once you’ve decided upon a topic or a story you want to write, SEO copywriting begins! The SEO writing process consists of three stages: preparing, writing, and correcting (or editing).
Phase 1 of the writing process: Preparing your text
The first phase of the actual SEO copywriting process is planning your piece. Before you put pen to paper (or fingers on the keyboard), take some time and think about what you will write. You’ll have a topic in mind by now, but before you start writing, you should have clear answers to the following questions as well:
What’s the purpose of your article? Why are you writing? What do you want to achieve?
What will be the main message of your post? What’s the key question you want to answer?
In what order will you present your information? What will be the structure of your article?
In our post about preparing a blog post, you can read all about how to come up with proper and clear answers to these questions.
The purpose of your text and search intent
The first question in the list is: what’s the purpose of your article. Thinking about that beforehand is essential because it affects how you should write your article. Do you want to inform users? Amuse them? Or persuade them to do something on your site? The preparation step is also when you should consider your visitor’s intent. If your keyword research shows that the intent behind a particular query is informational, you would like to write a persuasive, sales-focused page for that keyword. In that case, that could be a better match. Of course, this will be fine if you’ve thought about your keyword strategy.
In any case, you need to think about your user’s intent before you start writing, simply because an informative text differs from a persuasive text. The language you’ll use when writing an informative text should be clear and focused, whereas persuasive language will usually be very positive, focusing more on the reader. And amusing texts use more informal language, wordplay, or exaggerations.
An important element of planning your article is setting up its structure. The structure of the text on your site is vital for SEO copywriting. If your content has a clear structure, you have a better chance of ranking well on Google. You can use mind-mapping techniques to help grasp topics and find connections between the different parts of your subject.
It pays off to think about the structure of your piece before you begin. Because the structure is the skeleton of your text, it will help the reader grasp the article’s main points.
Posts and pages with a clear structure will also increase conversions on your website. You have a better chance that your visitors will buy your products or return to your website if they understand your message correctly. For practical tips on how to set up the structure of a piece of writing, you should read our post on how to create a clear blog post structure.
Generative AI can help you structure content and describe topics
You shouldn’t use generative AI like ChatGPT to automatically generated full articles for you. You can use them to get a better grasp of a topic, to get more context, and to be inspired. Generative AI can also help with structuring text, like:
Automating content outlines: Generative AI can suggest content outlines based on the identified topic or keywords. This can help you create articles, posts, and other types of content by providing you with a text structure and writing guidance.
Identifying key phrases and topics: Generative AI can access large amounts of data to identify key phrases or topics that recur in a particular field. This can help you include important information in your content and structure it to follow a cohesive narrative or theme.
Providing content recommendations: Generative AI can suggest related content that you can use to structure your writing. It can analyze the content available and identify related information that would be relevant to the topic at hand.
Offering writing assistance: Generative AI can suggest sentence structure, grammar, and punctuation to help produce well-structured content. This can help you create high-quality, readable content that is easier for audiences to engage with.
Formatting and layout suggestions: This feature can help your content planning and optimize it for user engagement, providing the most effective structure based on the type of content that needs to be created.
These helpful features enable you to create high-quality, optimized content that drives more traffic and engagement, but be critical and remember the human touch.
Phase 2 of the writing process: Writing your text
Now you can start the actual SEO writing process! This only takes about 20% of your time on your article.
Just write!
The most important tip for this phase of SEO copywriting is to just write. People often have trouble formulating the first sentence (or the first paragraph). But, at this stage, you can skip writing that first paragraph altogether. Just write a few words referring to the content your first paragraph should contain and start writing the second paragraph. Beginnings and endings are easier to write once you’ve fleshed out the main body of your post.
If a sentence isn’t grammatically correct or sounds awkward, keep going, and don’t worry. You can rewrite these things in the next phase, which is editing. In the writing phase, staying in the flow of writing is crucial.
Stick to the structure of your text
While writing, use the structure you created in the preparation phase as an outline and write the paragraphs according to that plan. Make sure you write clear paragraphs. Start each paragraph with the most important sentence, then explain or elaborate. Your readers will be able to grasp the most important content from your article by just reading the first sentences of your paragraphs.
Make sure your text is readable
Reading from a screen is hard, so if you want your readers to read your entire blog post, you must make it easy to read. Posts that are easily read will result in more returning visitors and a higher conversion rate. Most importantly, make sure your text is pitched right for the audience you’re writing for.
Some people are natural writers and don’t need any tips for their SEO copywriting – they can write an attractive, fun, readable article in a few minutes. Others lack that skill. But while attractive writing is a matter of talent, practice surely helps! Let’s look at some tips to improve your writing style and two writing styles to experiment with.
Tip: Read a lot!
If you want to develop an attractive writing style, it helps to read a lot. Reading (novels, blogs, magazines, whatever) will inspire you to write excellent articles. It will teach you how other people form their sentences and build their paragraphs. It teaches you how to use humor and how to play with language. Plus, it allows you to develop a gut feeling about what makes a nicely readable article. If you want more tips on developing your writing style, read our blog post about achieving an attractive style.
The inverted pyramid style
A well-known writing style in journalism, the inverted pyramid means you put your most important information upfront. You don’t bury your key point halfway down the third paragraph but tell the complete story in the first paragraph. Of course, you can elaborate in the following paragraphs. But you get your main message across right away. This writing style holds up pretty well for some types of articles. It especially comes in handy now that web content is increasingly used to answer every question a searcher might have.
Everyone loves a good story, and most people can also tell a good story – especially from personal experience. Great news: you can use the power of stories in your SEO copy! Whether in blog posts or product pages, including a (relevant) story will go a long way in catching your reader’s interest. Stories can provide more clarity and help your readers remember you more easily.
SEO copywriting can be a fairly intense process. If you write for long periods, you’ll find that concentrating becomes harder. The exact time, however, will be different for every individual. If your mind has started to wander, that’ll be the time to take a break.
Many people find writing hard for more than twenty minutes at a time — attention spans can be quite short! At that point, people should step away from the computer to do something else. Even a minute-long break can be enough to return to your writing with fresh and renewed concentration and creativity.
Phase 3 of the SEO copywriting process: Editing your text
Once you’ve finished writing your piece, you’ll have the first draft of your article. You will improve upon this first draft in the final phase of writing. The last step will still take quite a lot of time.
The editing phase is the phase of the SEO copywriting process in which you should ‘kill your darlings’. Don’t be afraid to throw stuff out. You should read and re-read and re-re-read your post and correct any awkward sentences, unclear phrasing, and jumbled paragraph structures. Make your content marketing stand out.
Here are five steps to take to edit your article thoroughly.
Step 1: Read slowly (and out loud)
You can start this phase by reading your piece slowly (and even out loud, this can help). Each sentence should be grammatically correct, and the spelling must be flawless. You need to be very critical of your work. You can have your computer read the text out loud for you — make sure it doesn’t stumble.
Step 2: Focus on sentences
Start by making sure every sentence is correct. Focus on the spelling of words and rephrase awkward formulations. Ensure sentences are grammatically correct and check for readability: ensure your sentences aren’t too long.
Step 3: Focus on paragraphs
If all sentences in one paragraph are approved, look at the structure within a paragraph, focusing on that first sentence. Does that first core sentence capture what you wanted to say in that paragraph? Are the sentences within a paragraph presented in a logical order? Do you use transition words to make the connection between sentences clear?
Step 4: Check the text structure
Check whether the structure between paragraphs is clear. Are your article’s topics presented logically, or do you need to make changes?
You should also check your headings and subheadings. Make sure your focus keyword is in one of those headings and subheadings. But equally important, ensure the headings help your readers grasp your text’s structure. In the article on how to use headings on your site, we explain how to use them.
Step 5: Ask for feedback
The final step in your SEO copywriting process is getting feedback. After editing your text, you should ask people for feedback. At Yoast, all the posts we write are read by at least two of our colleagues before we publish them. Feedback allows for the perspective of someone other than the writer and almost always leads to vast improvements in the post.
It would also be useful to let someone from your audience proofread your post to test whether the message is communicated properly. Also, feedback from someone with professional writing and grammar skills, such as an editor, will help you improve your blog post even further.
Writing well is hard; writing your content marketing efforts in multiple languages is even more challenging! This is true if you own websites for multiple regions and languages. Translating content can be a tricky business because of the phenomenon of false friends in different languages. False friends refer to words that look alike in two languages but mean something different.
Creating content for your multilingual sites is not easy. It’s doable, though, and we think there are three ways to go about this:
translate the content;
create new content for that market;
transcreate content: a combination of both.
Getting translations probably is the easiest. But it’s also the most tricky one. Are you sure your translation sends the same message and has the same tone of voice as your original article? That’s hard to judge if you’re not a native speaker. Therefore: always have a native speaker check the copy. At least.
Creating new content by your local team is the safest choice, with probably the highest quality result. However, it is very time-consuming, and you’re not taking full advantage of the available content.
Therefore we’d advise to “transcreate”: take what you already have as a basis, but rework it to fit the local target group. Make sure native speakers that know the local market create this content. If you’d like to know more about this, read our article on creating great copy in multiple languages.
Conclusion: SEO copywriting is a process
SEO copywriting works best when you follow a defined process and ensure your text is as good as possible. While not everyone is a natural writer, SEO writing is something everyone can get better at with practice. Don’t forget to maintain your content over time to avoid it getting outdated and stale!
Content SEO is a key part of any SEO strategy. Without content, it’s impossible for your site to rank in search engines. It’s, therefore, crucial to write and structure quality content! This ultimate guide covers the most important areas of content SEO. Read on if you want to learn how to create content that ranks.
Have you heard about Google’s helpful content update? From now on, the quality of your content could have an even bigger impact on your rankings.
We know that creating high-quality content isn’t easy. But our Premium SEO analysis can help! It’s just as smart as Google, helping you create rich and helpful content in a natural way and improving your rankings!
Content SEO refers to creating content that helps your web pages to rank high in the search engines. It includes everything, from writing to structuring the content on your website. There are three major elements you need to consider that will make your website rank well: keyword strategy, site structure and copywriting.
Why is content SEO important in the first place? Because search engines like Google read your website, so the words you use determine whether or not your site will rank in their results pages. Of course, your website should be well-designed, with a great user interface, and all the technical stuff that makes your site rank in Google should also be covered. But without quality content your site doesn’t stand a chance in the search engines.
1. Keyword research
What is keyword research?
Keyword research is basically the steps you take to create an extensive list of keywords you would like to rank for. Every content SEO strategy should begin with keyword research, because you have to know what your audience is searching for if you want to generate traffic. Keyword research helps you to discover the terms you should be aiming to rank for.
Keyword research has four steps:
Write down the mission of your business;
Make a list of all the keywords you want to be found for;
Look at search intent;
Create landing pages for these keywords.
If you do your keyword research right, you should have a clear overview of the terms people use and the terms for which you want the pages on your site to be found. This overview will serve as a guide for writing content on your website.
Why is keyword research so important for SEO content?
Proper keyword research will make clear which search terms your audience uses. This is crucial. At Yoast, we regularly encounter clients who use particular words when talking about their products, while their customers use entirely different words. Writing and optimizing SEO content for words that people don’t use doesn’t make any sense. Doing proper keyword research makes sure that you are using the same words as your target audience, therefore making the effort of optimizing your website worthwhile.
Terms we use in keyword research
Keywords and keyphrases
We tend to use the word ‘keyword‘ all the time. However, it doesn’t have to be just one word. After all, ‘WordPress SEO’ is a keyword, as is ‘Google Analytics plugin.’ So you can have keywords containing multiple words!
Long-tail keywords
The longer (and more specific) a search term is, the easier it will be to rank for that term. Keywords that are more specific (and usually longer) are usually referred to as long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are more specific and focus more on a niche.
How many keywords?
It is very hard to give an exact number of keywords you should focus on. You just need to have a lot – as many as you can come up with. More than 1,000 keywords is probably too many though!
Even if you’re a reasonably small business, you’ll probably end up with a couple of hundred keywords. But you don’t have to create pages for all of these immediately. The great thing about having a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress is that you can gradually add content. Think about what keywords you would like to rank for right away, and which ones aren’t immediately important. Determine what your priorities are and plan the creation of your content.
Head or tail?
Classifying your keywords is essential. Some keywords are very common and competitive (head), while others are long-tail. Decide which are your most critical, high-level keywords – the ones that generate sufficient traffic for your website and best fit your business. You’ll probably only have a few of these general keywords for your business, the rest will be more down the tail. In the next section, we’ll give more in-depth information on long-tail keywords (and the importance of these keywords).
Tip: Make sure your homepage and the pages one level beneath that are optimized for the most common keywords! Content that’s focused on long-tail keywords (and therefore more niche) should be on the tail end of your site.
Keyword intent and search intent
As you’re doing keyword research, it really pays off to think about the search intent of users. Are they looking for information, or do they want to buy something? What is their goal when they enter your keyword as a search term? This goal is otherwise known as keyword intent. For some keywords, it’s pretty clear, like [buy leather sofa], or [how to train your puppy]. But it’s not always that simple.
Four types of intent
There are four types of intent:
Navigational intent: People want to visit a specific website, but rather than entering the URL, they’re entering a term into a search engine.
Informational intent: People are trying to find an answer to a particular question or information on a specific topic.
Commercial intent: People want to buy something in the near future and are doing research before making a purchase.
Transactional intent: People are looking to buy something after doing their commercial intent searches.
Search engines are always trying to answer the exact needs people have, and they’re getting better at it too. So, put simply, if 95% of the people searching for [change car tire] have informational intent, and you’re optimizing for transactional intent to sell tires, you’re probably not going to rank.
Check the SERPs
You can get a wealth of information from the results pages when you’re doing keyword research. If you want to find out what the intent is of people using your keywords, simply google those keywords and take a good look at the search results. Then, try to create content that answers the specific need that you distill from the results for each keyword. Tip: Read more about how to use the search results to create content for the right intent here.
There are multiple free and premium tools available to help you with your keyword research. Yoast SEO comes with a Semrush integration that gives suggestions for related keyphrases, including search volume trends. Of course, this is not a full keyword research tool. But it can help you gain valuable insights, and find high-performing keywords! For other tools, please check out our article about keyword research tools.
Adapting your keyword strategy
Your keyword strategy shouldn’t be static. It should change and evolve alongside your company and website. It should evolve and grow with you. If it doesn’t, you’re doing it wrong.
Stay on top of the changes in your company, and adapt your strategy simultaneously. If your online shop starts selling new products, extend your list with more keywords. If you’re aiming for new markets, it’s vital that your keywords are aimed at these new markets as well.
There are several keyword strategies to adopt. One of them is to try and rank for long-tail keywords first, then aim at more general keywords. But you could also start by focusing on general keywords before aiming for more long-tail ones. You can zoom in and pursue more niche activities, broaden your approach, adding more content on different things, or you can do both simultaneously.
2. Site structure
The second important aspect of content SEO is the structure of your site. First, I’ll explain why site structure is critical, then I’ll show you what an ideal site structure looks like. I will also give you tips on how to (quickly) improve your site structure without completely disrupting the core of your website.
Why is site structure important for content SEO?
There are two main reasons why site structure is an important ranking factor and therefore imperative for building SEO content:
a. A good structure helps Google ‘understand’ your site
The way your site is structured gives Google significant clues about where to find the most important content. Your site’s structure determines whether a search engine understands what your site is about, and how easily it will find and index content relevant to your site’s purpose and intent. A good site structure will, therefore, lead to a higher ranking in Google.
By creating such a structure, you can use existing content that has attracted links from others to help your other pages rank too. Your site’s structure will help spread some of that link juice to the other pages on your site. On a commercial site, this means you can use high-quality content you’ve written to boost the search engine rankings of your sales pages too.
b. A good structure makes sure you aren’t competing with your own SEO content
You will probably have multiple articles about similar topics on your site. At Yoast, for example, we write about SEO. If we wrote eight articles about SEO, Google wouldn’t know which one is the most important. That’s why we used our site structure to clarify this. If we hadn’t, we’d be competing with our own articles for Google’s top spot. So if you solve problems like this by using a sound internal linking structure, the result will be higher rankings overall.
The ideal site structure
Ideally, you should structure your site like a pyramid. At the top is your homepage. On your homepage, you link to some other pages (such as category pages). These pages, in turn, link to even more pages.
In an effective content SEO strategy, your keyword strategy and the way you structure your site work together. In a proper keyword strategy, you’ll have thought about common, competitive keywords as well as long-tail (and niche) search terms. You should make a similar dichotomy in your site structure. Pages that focus on common search terms should appear high in your pyramid, while pages that are optimized for long-tail keywords should appear in a lower part of your structure. And don’t forget to let the long-tail pages at the bottom link to the pages higher in the pyramid!
If you’re serious about content SEO, you’ll most likely already have a live website. So it may be a bit late to set up your site’s structure in an ideal pyramid-like way. Don’t despair – there are still plenty of things you can do to improve your site’s structure and your SEO content.
Decide upon cornerstone content
You should focus your efforts on cornerstone articles. These are the articles that you’re most proud of, and that fit the mission of your website best. You want to rank for these articles the most. Fun fact: This ultimate guide is one of our cornerstones!
If you haven’t decided which of your articles are the most important yet, start thinking about that now. Make these articles the best ones on your site. Give them extra TLC and update them regularly.
Once you’ve decided upon your precious cornerstones, make sure you link from all your ‘tail’ articles to those cornerstones. That way, Google will know which articles to rank highest. You can read all about this in our article about incorporating cornerstones into your site structure. Good to know: Yoast SEO Premium has an advanced internal linking tool that automatically suggests relevant articles to link from.
Pro tip: You can use our cornerstone content SEO workout in Yoast SEO Premium to check on all your cornerstone content pages, see how many internal links they’re getting, and quickly add more if necessary.
Use tags (but not too many)
Your site will also benefit from adding tags. Tags and taxonomies will give your site more structure – at least, Google will understand it better. They group your articles about similar topics. Don’t overdo it, though. Some people have more tags than articles. Using too many tags will lead to a confusing and poorly-structured site.
Avoid duplicate content
The same SEO content can turn up at multiple places on your site. As a reader, you don’t mind: you still get the content you came for. But a search engine has to choose something to show in the search results, as it doesn’t want to show the same content twice. And what about other sites that want to link to your product? Chances are that some of them will link to the first URL, while others will link to the second.
However, if you make sure that all these duplicate posts link to the same URL, your chances of ranking top 10 for the relevant keyword would be much higher. In other words: Canonicalization is the solution to duplicate content. You can configure the canonical URL in the advanced tab of Yoast SEO.
Remove old SEO content
Should you keep old content? That depends. You have three options: update, redirect, or merge. If the content on a page is outdated, remove it! But what about the valuable links to that page? After all, you want to make sure that you still benefit from these links, even though the page doesn’t exist anymore. That’s where the second option comes in: redirect.
Redirecting pages is easy if you have our Yoast SEO Premium plugin, which can help you take care of redirects. Preferably, you redirect the old URL (301) to the new and updated page or product. You can also redirect to a related page if there is no replacement. For example, the category page of the specific product, or, as a very last resort, your homepage. This way, the (outdated) page won’t interfere with your site structure anymore.
Deal with orphaned content
The term ‘orphaned content’ refers to articles that don’t have any links from your other articles or posts. Because of that, these articles are hard to find, both by Google and by your users. What’s more, Google will consider this type of content to be less important! So if an article is important to you, you should make it clear to Google (and your visitors) by linking to that particular article from other (related) content. Read more about solving the problem of orphaned articles in our article about orphaned content.
Pro tip: Use our orphaned content SEO workout in Yoast SEO Premium to quickly find and fix pages with no incoming internal links.
Deal with content cannibalization
Once you’ve been writing content for a while, you might have dozens of articles on any given topic. If these articles are kind of saying the same thing, search engines and users might get confused. Not to mention the fact that your content might compete against itself in the search engines. This is called keyword cannibalization. It’s not inherently bad, but it’s something you need to take a look at. Are your articles performing as well as they should, or is the competition hurting the chances at a higher ranking? Luckily, it’s not hard to find and fix keyword cannibalization.
3. Copywriting for content SEO
The third and final aspect of a successful content SEO strategy is copywriting. Two very important things to remember: Write articles that are attractive to read, and that will make your audience want to stay on your site. However, you shouldn’t forget to make your SEO content attractive for Google. Just don’t go too far by optimizing your content so overtly that it becomes terrible to read. At Yoast, we suggest optimizing your text for search without adversely affecting the originality of your idea or the readability of your text.
The first requirement for high-quality copywriting is to write original content. Your post or article should be ‘fresh,’ new, and original. It has to be different from all the other posts and articles that are already on the internet. Plus, it should be content that people want to read.
If you did your keyword research well, you now have a long list of terms that you want to be found for. This list can be a guide for you to choose from. A keyword isn’t necessarily a topic, though. You should make sure to come up with an original idea for your blog post – an idea in which the desired focus keyword has a prominent place.
But don’t worry! Original SEO content doesn’t mean brand new content. Giving your (professional) opinion on a particular topic also counts as original content. Because your personal angle to a story will make your content unique and original. Of course, if your story is completely new, that automatically means it’s original.
Think about your audience
If you want to write original content, you should think about your audience and who they are. Also, ask yourself:
What do you want your audience to do after they’ve read your article? (Do you want them to engage, buy your products/service, or read more posts?)
Thinking about these questions will help you to come up with an original idea for your post or article.
Content design and content SEO
Content design is a process that helps you produce content based on actual user needs. It doesn’t just help you figure out what your user wants, but it also focuses on what the user actually needs. Thinking about your content in this way will help you create content in the language and format that your user needs.
However, content design isn’t just a technique to help you produce better content – it’s a new way of thinking about content. If you want to know more about content design, read our post on content design: a great way to make user-centered content.
Copywriting requires readable SEO content
A key requirement for writing high-quality content is to write content that’s easy to read. Readability is important both for your audience and for Google. After all, not only people read your articles but Google does too.
If your text is well structured and clearly written, readers will be able to clearly understand your message. And so will Google! If your main message is clear to Google, your post is far more likely to rank well in the search engines.
As Google is getting smarter, it starts to understand content on sites better — thanks to a lot of developments in the natural language processing sphere, like BERT. It’s no longer just about the number of times a keyword pops on a page. It also takes into account the context of those keywords, like co-occurring terms and phrases, related words and synonyms. On top of that, as mentioned before, Google is able to understand queries of users better: it tries to determine what the search intent of the user is. Are they looking for a product or just information? Which pages fit that intent best?
All these developments mean that you should focus on more than just using your keyword often enough. It means you should also think about the words you use around it: do they make clear what topic you’re discussing? And, do you have the purpose in mind of the post or page you’re creating? Does it just provide information or are you trying to sell something, and does that align with what your users are actually looking for? Yoast SEO Premium lets you optimize your SEO content with synonyms and related keyphrases, making it even easier to add context to your articles.
The final requirement for writing high-quality content is to make sure the content is optimized for search engines. You want your SEO content to be easily found. Findability has to do with increasing the likelihood Google will pick up your content for the result pages. It’s important that you take this final step after you’ve written an original and readable post.
Yoast SEO helps you tweak your text just a little bit more. If you’ve written your article, focused on that original idea, and optimized the readability of your post, you should take a look at the SEO analysis in Yoast SEO. Red and orange bullets indicate which aspects of your findability need a little bit more attention. You don’t need a green bullet for every aspect though, as long as your overall score is good.
Content SEO is such a huge part of SEO. It encompasses every aspect of writing and structuring content on your website. Content SEO is essential. No one will read your content if it’s crappy. Like visitors, Google reads and scans your website text. Google’s algorithm decides the ranking of your site largely based on the content you publish. And we all know content is king. So, you need to write awesome SEO content, focus on the right keywords and structure your website in such a way Google understands it. It’s a lot of work, but it will pay off in the long run.
As you’ve learned from this guide, there’s a lot you need to do to keep your site’s content SEO fit. Take this short test and find out if there are some aspects of content SEO you may need to improve!
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:
No, it’s not writing about nature. It means you write in a way that flows well and sounds natural. As if you were talking to someone. Now, we’re not saying to write slang words and half-finished sentences, because that wouldn’t read very well. So, what is natural writing? Read more to find out!
Write like you talk (kind of)
As we mentioned before, natural writing is writing in a way that’s similar to how you talk. Except a little prettier. Words like ‘kinda’ and ‘yeah’ and ‘cuz’ aren’t generally accepted as ‘professional’ language, so if you want to write for businesses (maybe your own) you should avoid slang.
However, there are things you can copy from the way you talk. For example, keeping things short and to the point! Just think about it: If you’re telling a story to friends, you won’t spend paragraphs introducing your story. Generally, you give context in a few sentences before you dive right in. And that’s also what you should do when writing!
Use short and common words
If you’re a language nerd, you probably know a lot of big, impressive words. Which is exceptional, exemplary, and marvelous! But they can also make your texts harder to read. If you use short and simple words, your writing will read more quickly. Of course, it’s fine to use ‘receive’ instead of ‘get’ every once in a while. But try to keep your vocabulary relatively simple.
Read your texts out loud
Natural writing is all about flow. The best way to find out if your story flows well and sounds natural is to read it out loud. You’ll quickly notice which parts feel awkward, too long, or overly formal. Imagine how you would say those sentences if you were telling the story instead. Then write that down.
Don’t overuse your keyword
Why not? Well, if you repeat the same keyword over and over again, your text will read very unnaturally. Just think about it. Would you rather read: “A blueberry pie is the best dessert to eat during the holidays. Everyone likes blueberry pie. That’s why I created this blueberry pie recipe. So you can treat everyone with a delicious blueberry pie this year.” Or: “A blueberry pie is the best dessert to eat during the holidays. Everyone likes it. That’s why I created this recipe, so you can treat everyone this year.” The second reads better, right?
And overusing your keyword is not even necessary for your SEO! Because Google wants your audience to have a great experience on your website. But if your text is unreadable, your audience will quickly click away, and Google won’t rank your page or post very high.
Let your sentences flow
Okay, we mentioned ‘flow’ a few times now. After all, flow is important if you want your text to read naturally. But what does it mean when a text flows well? Generally, a good flow is when your sentence length alternates. You can go: short, medium, long. Or: long, short, long. Heck, you could even try: short, short, long. As long as you alternate your sentence length and never write four short/medium/long sentences in a row, you’re good to go! And try to read your writing out loud afterwards. It really does help!
Dictate, then write
If you’re struggling with writing like you speak, why not switch it around? Dictate your text, or simply record what you’re saying, then write it down. Of course, you’ll still need to review your text. When people talk they sometimes forget the point they’re trying to make. But that’s fine. You can always edit and adjust until it sounds coherent.
The text was written naturally by you
This is an example of a passive sentence. And let’s be honest: Who talks in passive sentences? No one! Sure, they come up every once in a while, but not often. So if you want to write more naturally, be mindful of the passive voice. It can come across as impersonal, or simply boring.
Unfortunately, passive sentences still creep into your texts sometimes. So what do you need to look out for? Search for sentences with the word ‘to’. People often use ‘to’ when they’re slipping into a passive voice. For example, “When it’s time to clean your house, you better clear your calendar.†A more active sentence would be: “Clear your calendar before you clean your house.†Or even: “Need to clean your house? Then clear your calendar.â€
Good to note: Passive sentences aren’t wrong. They’re totally fine to use every once in a while. Just be mindful of them. Especially if you tend to use them a lot in your writing. Luckily, the Yoast SEO Premium plugin scans your text and highlights passive sentences, so you can easily fix them.
Example of what natural writing is
Natural writing sounds great in theory, but what does it look like in practice? Well, let’s look at an example. First, we have a formal and slightly boring text:
Stamp collecting is generally accepted as one of the areas that make up the wider subject of philately, which is the study of stamps. A philatelist may, but does not have to, collect stamps. It is not uncommon for the term philatelist to be used to mean a stamp collector. Many casual stamp collectors accumulate stamps for sheer enjoyment and relaxation without worrying about the tiny details. The creation of a large or comprehensive collection, however, generally requires some philatelic knowledge and will usually contain areas of philatelic studies.
Be honest. Did you read all of that? Probably not. So let’s make it a more interesting text by using short and simple words, alternating our sentence length, and just getting straight to the point. You’ll get:
Philately is the study of stamps. You’d think that a philatelist is someone who collects stamps, but that isn’t always true. Some philatelists collect stamps, and some don’t. But why do people collect the little squares in the first place? Multiple reasons! Sometimes for enjoyment and relaxation. Others, however, simply want to own a large collection. In order to start a collection though, you have to know at least something about stamps.
Reads better, right?
Anyone can write naturally
Like most skills, natural writing is also something you can learn. You just have to know what to do, then practice! And don’t worry if you don’t get it right on the first try. Most people have to revise their texts at least once. Just remember to get straight to the point, use simple words, and alternate your sentences. And when you’re done, read your text out loud to see how it flows. Good luck!
