 Well, thank you all for postponing your beer and sitting down for us Very happy to have you here Well, this is us, but we've talked about that and we have slides There is quite a bit of content on some of them if you want to follow along they're there if you want to get them later That's fine, too. I Want to talk about a bit about what we're doing here You've seen the purple shirts and dresses. There's 14 of us around here. There's now 45 people working at Yoast which frightens the out of me Because well Only five years ago. It was just me. Luckily my wife was always with me So I'm very happy to present me presenting alongside her I've taken some pictures. You've seen the Yoast Lego things if you haven't you should And then there's this slide Well, Yoast usually doesn't do this But I thought when I have the opportunity to talk in front of an audience of a thousand people I'm going to show off the thing. I'm most proud of so These are our children and the offence Yoast the SEO plug-in was a great achievement But I think these are your best achievement yet I Could fill up the whole talk talking about my children, but I think you're not here to to hear me talking about them So we're going to talk about SEO copywriting so Yoast's main focus and expertise always has been on SEO and mine was on writing and about two and a half years ago I joined the company and Well, we started get going on the importance of writing for SEO and I think what we are presenting today is actually Been the results of two and a half years of work So Yoast is first going to explain why SEO copywriting or copywriting in general is important for SEO Well, let's start with Google Of course SEO focuses on all the search engines in the world and there are seem to be more search engines than Google But especially in Europe, I think we can say that search is Google And Google has a mission that is quite daunting But also tells us a lot about what they want to do Their mission is to organize the world's information make it universally accessible and useful Which is quite a bit. It's not just all the information on the web. It's all the world's information Which is why you see them doing all these other things scanning entire libraries You see them work on Things like Google Maps where if you have a phone number on a wall somewhere and The Google Maps car comes by and scans that thing a few days later You'll actually be able to search for that phone number in Google Maps and it will show you where it is on the wall Google is getting frighteningly good at indexing everything Now what we tried to do is we try to improve a website's position in the free or organic results Those are the results that you see below those three or four ads It's actually Shocking sometimes how far down the organic results are now these days But for quite a few terms you can still get an enormous amount of traffic by optimizing for SEO And we've always been one of the companies telling you to do SEO in a way that We don't promote what we call scorched earth tactics We won't be telling you to buy links We won't be telling you to optimize your site in ridiculous ways that are not useful for the user Why not well because we prefer sustainable SEO We prefer to build up your site in such a way that it will still be there And we'll still be ranking in two or three years from now and not be gone entirely We've seen a lot of people do it the other way around We actually help people every once in a while they come to us for a review because they've burnt themselves Hard and it's usually quite a bit work to get them back and not always even really possible to get them back If they've done really stupid things So we tried to do SEO in a way that's sustainable and works in the long run We tried to do that by focusing not just on some technical things But focusing on all the aspects of website optimization We believe that you have to be the best result in order to be number one This means that you have to think about a concept that we call holistic SEO Holistic meaning all-encompassing everything is SEO or SEO isn't everything else So small things like technical excellence, which is of course fairly easy if you're using WordPress We with Yoast SEO tries to do the remaining things that WordPress doesn't do well enough We try to do in Yoast SEO so that we take all the technical stuff away from you because it's not thing Something that a normal user should be thinking about We need you to have flawless security and That means a tiny bit more than just installing a security plug-in But at the same time it's also something that we are very aware of that it's not our main focus So do talk to the guys at Suckery or someone else that is really good at WordPress security And make sure that your site is secure because everything we talk about today doesn't really help you if you just start gets hacked We need to have good UX and UI who if you were in here for Matt's session And who have you heard my leave from Google ask a question that was actually very shocking to me saying we still see 28% of new sites coming online and not being mobile-friendly I Seriously can't understand how in 2016 that still happens if You have sites or your building sites and they're not mobile-friendly. They're not working on any divides Then you're doing it wrong You need to have awesome PR and social Which means that you have to tell people about what you're doing because you could be building the most awesome thing in the world But if you're not telling people about that awesome thing, they will never get there If you build it they will come it's something that in the valley people have been shouting for quite a bit And now all of these people are hiring growth marketers Which is just a glorified term for hiring good SEO's if you look at all the growth hackers in the world that are famous now And you look at their background almost all of them are SEO's by background There's a reason to that you need to talk about these things marketing and PR are very important But I hear you're thinking we were gonna talk about copywriting right well We will because with all of these things they all work in in tandem But if your content is shitty Then they're also absolutely no use So we need quality content Now there are more reasons why you need quality content. We're not there yet. You have to tell them something else What do I have to tell you have to tell them why quality content is important for SEO So you've talked about holistic SEO Yes, if I don't know that okay, so this happens all the time It's my wife telling me that I'm doing things wrong Which is probably why we have a plug-in and a company that actually works because I just go off and talk and then I forget So quality content is Quality content is important for SEO for one simple reason if Google can understand all that then quality content means that Google can understand your site and It really goes to the extent of what does Google do with text? What does why doesn't this work anymore? I was too quick wasn't I? sorry, so And in the past who here has done keywords stuffing at some point who has maintained the site and stuffed keywords into pages Come on. There's more of you. I know there is We all know this used to work And we all know that this doesn't work anymore. Why is that once fairly simple Google has gotten better at actually understanding your text a Year ago, they released hummingbird. I think it's about two years ago now actually they released hummingbird in which they said Hey, we can understand your queries better They can understand if you search for the world's best SEO plug-in They'll actually search for best SEO plug-in, and they know they have to ignore the word world Because that is not really that important to that query. So they truly understand your text If they can do that to your queries, they can do that to your content too So they can understand what you're talking about a lot better than most people are used to and they're not thinking purely about Keywords anymore. They're thinking about content and about topics in a far More overarching way than most people realize And now we get to why quality content is also important. That's true So you already told why it's important for SEO, but quality content has always been important just because of another bunch of reasons And the first one is that people will understand your message So every article or piece of text you write and put on your side has a message something You want people to remember or to do after they read your article? So it could be that you're just explaining your shipping process and the explanation is the message You want to let them come through if an article is really poorly written then this message won't come through So people won't understand what you're talking about if you don't write a nice text very important most important things Second one and this actually has a lot to do with SEO is that high quality content will will result in a lower bounce rate So people come in from your to your site from Google And then they look at a piece of text and when it's crappy They will go away and when it's good they will stay at your site and read your article Maybe buy your stuff if they go away instantly this will result in a lower bounce rate and eventually your ranking will go down So very higher bounce rates. Oh, sorry Okay Third reason is that high quality content leads to more trust if your articles are well written You will come across as more legit and professional than when you have lots of typos and Lots of mistakes in your grammar and it's really poorly everything So very important to have more trust if your article is of better quality And the last reason why high quality content is important is that it will gain more attention on social media So for me to post something on my Facebook timeline Then I have to like and understand the message and I should like it enough to To send it to all of my friends, right? And if if an article is really poorly written, I won't do that and you won't do that either So the very important and more attention in social media eventually leads to higher ranking as well so We knew all this and then we thought What do you think? Well, we thought okay, so how do you write quality content? What is quality content? What is well readable content? This is where we started to do research. This is also where I get to put a colleague who's sitting in front here Irene who we hired to do a lot of research into this Irene is a linguist and we together with Marika She did a lot of research into okay, so what makes a text readable and What are things in readable text that we can actually in a programmatic way Do to help you write better text? There's a whole story to that But we've actually brought a magazine with you and we will tell you to read that because otherwise We will never get to our there's a puzzle in there, too So grab on yeah, I come grab it at our booth. It's free. If you all like it enough We might even make it a quarterly Which I have been told is only funny for those of us in the wordpress community long enough I don't get that job But there's there's a lot to know there What is really important to know is that we've done quite intensive research and okay? What is it that really makes a text readable? I'll leave it up to Marika to tell that because I can actually write readable text. Oh, you can now Yeah, so we have four things that you should be focusing on if you want to write Readable nice brief text and the first one is to focus on your structure So before you start writing I would advise you to think about what it is you want to tell your audience and to think about What are you going to tell them and in what order so make kind of sort of a skeleton of your text? That structure is really important for people to grasp the message of your text and probably also important for Google to Grasp the message of your text and to think about how they are going to do those rankings. So A really important is clear paragraph a Paragraph should have one idea not two one and I think that For the web you should start each paragraph with one core sentence the sentence that really covers the topic that you are addressing in that paragraph And why is that well if people are scanning a text and they will come across a white space They will read the first sentence After the white space if that sentence is really the most important sentence of your paragraph People will easily grasp the structure of your text and you would want that because it's hard reading from screen So one core sentence and another few sentences to elaborate on your point, right? Don't write paragraphs that are too long, but don't add random white space just because it looks nice We had a colleague. I won't mention his name but But now I've written like four or five sentences and I need a white space Yeah Then either you are making your paragraph too long because two ideas and then you should have separate paragraphs for them Or you should do something else But not randomly you should think about that. He never does it anymore So in use transition words, which well is something that my son was I don't know what's what the equivalent of Hoops says in Holland for you will go is this but he's ten and he's learning about these words in Dutch And he says well if I come across such a word, I know what is coming. Yes readers know what is coming if you use these words So if you are enumerating use words to help people understand There's something coming something else So first of all also another will help people to grasp the structure of your text more easily So use these kinds of words Use clear headings that these are important for SEO as well So you should you should put your the words you want to be found on in these headings because these words are probably So the topic of your text or you're doing is wrong and then make sure that the paragraph that comes after a heading is well is summarized in that heading headings are also The thing that that readers need to grasp the structure of your text Make sure your text is easy to read You could have a blog For PhDs only and then you can write like really difficult texts or really you could do that But most of us will have a general audience. Well, perhaps most of you will have a development audience That's another story, but if you have a general audience Use short sentences and simple words. So make your sentences about 20 words per sentence that's about the amount of words people can can can keep in there in their short-term memory and Getting lots of sentences longer than 20 words makes it's really hard use simple words That means words with less than three syllables And keep your audience in mind Less than four What less than four cylinder syllables? You've made it very hard for yourself with that equal or less than I don't understand I can't pronounce the word syllables It's hard So make sure it's easy to read and make sure your text is nice to read That's a hard one because style is something that some people have and others Well, just like but you could do some things avoid passive voice passive voice is When the object of an answer, sorry the subject of your sentence isn't in the sentence So this product can be bought in our webshop It's not clear who or what is doing anything and that results in very distant writing So it doesn't appeal to to you to your audience becomes very distant and weird a Better alternative would be to say customers can buy this product in our webshop So avoid passive voice and mix it up use synonyms. Yes No keyword stuffing Google understands the cinemas as well. So use them in your set in your in your text Mixed sentence length so longer and shorter sentences shorter and somewhat longer paragraphs and make variation in word order and if you do all these things you will Be great, but it's very hard. So well It in if you do all these things. Yeah, you'll Not need Yoast SEO 3.3 or not the new readability analysis that we put in there We called this content analysis at first and then we told everyone that their content was bad Apparently some of you didn't really like that. So now we call it readability and we'd say needs improvement Well, let's just say we're Dutch and we're harsh and And So we didn't mean to we took a bit of UK style and and made a readability needs improvement I Think it's it's good today if we take things from the Brits and learn things from them, right? Especially on a day like today It's in our free plug-in so don't worry This is not me talking to you about buying our stuff Even though I do want you to buy our stuff because that pays for all of us, but This is here for everyone what we try to do is we try to make all these things that we could just talk to that into rules and These are rules that actually tell you like hey, you've got over 25% of your sentences is longer than 20 words. Maybe your text is too hard to read We already had the flesh reading these text tests in Yoast SEO for quite a while We we now moved it to the readability tab The funny thing is that of all these things the flesh reading ease test is probably the least actionable test in there Because it it creates a score But it does that by doing it by doing a calculation of the amounts of hard words you use the amounts of long sentences You use etc. So it's actually pretty hard to action that all the other ones are very actionable so We say 14% of your sentences contains passive voice and you'll go like okay So what it uses it to me when you say 14% of your sentences uses passive voice? Well, it's very useful because there's this mark here this nice look Button, I was very happy to see a dimity as presentation on his first slide actually If you press that button then we'll actually highlight the sentences in your editor Showing you which sentences are in passive voice and which sentences are too long, etc As you start typing the highlighting will go away immediately because the editor is a enormous in to integrate with I Won't swear on stage or not too much at least This is absolutely work in progress. So we're doing more and more of these things We'll actually probably be releasing in the next month or so two or so more Of these six that we have now Only three work in non English Because a lot of these things need work lists and other Methods of actually seeing whether it's passive voice or a transition words, etc So we're working actively on getting this to more languages But bear with us and in fact, we will probably be asking for help at some point for several languages Do you have any questions on this?