How to Make Your Blog Post Better with Yoast Green Lights

Yoast Green Lights. If you’re a blogger on WordPress, you probably already know what I’m talking about! If you’re a beginner, or thinking about becoming a blogger, maybe you don’t. They’re the colorful markers that tell you if you’ve written a potentially effective blog post! You get them with the free Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. (For more Yoast SEO plugin info, click HERE. )

Background

What is a plugin, you ask? Well basically, it’s a little packet of software that lets you do something specific on your website. You get it, you “plug” it into your site, and you have extra functionality. Like checking your posts for readability and SEO, for instance!

The Yoast SEO plugin is the #1 SEO plugin for WordPress. That’s because it’s a really great tool for helping you write your post. I use the free version, but there’s a premium version that’s much more powerful. I’ll probably switch to that someday. But in the meantime:

What is SEO?

Now if you’re like me before I started blogging, you might not know what SEO means either. It stands for Search Engine Optimization. If you use SEO well, your posts will get found – and rank higher – on internet searches for things you write about.

The Yoast green lights let you know how you’re doing at optimizing your post for the keywords you’ve chosen. And they also give you an idea how easy it will be for your audience to read your post.

HOWEVER, even if you have all green lights all the time, there’s a lot more that goes into SEO. It’s super important to keep in mind that, while wonderful, the Yoast SEO tool is not going to automatically put you at the top of the rankings.

Yoast Green Lights are Just a Starting Point

I like to think of the green lights as a starting point on my posts. Once I’m sure I’ve caught as many as I can, I’m ready for the other aspects of SEO. (Which is a fascinating topic, but one we’ll save for another day!)

I’ll show you how the green lights work. Here’s how I started this post, below.

See in the middle of the page, the four tabs? One of them had an orange smiley face. Only it’s not very smiley. That’s because my post wasn’t very readable yet!

But then look! Even though I’d only written a couple paragraphs, it turned green (and smiling.) That’s because I started using the green light “rules of writing.”

When You’re a Beginning Writer

Before I started my blog, I would never have described myself as a writer. A story-teller, maybe, but mostly in the vein of “Did I ever tell you about the time … ” Most of my friends are used to me, and only roll their eyes when I’m not looking.

I also tend to talk with a lot of run-on sentences, arcane vocabulary, and weird references that nobody else ever gets. (Except my husband – we could go for days just quoting our favorite movies!)

So it was, shall we say, a challenge for me to write something that’s easy to read.

To show you what I mean, here are the readability lights from my very first post. Not enough greens there, folks!

In fact, a serious red frowny face! But see? I had some things right. Just not enough for the smile.

Lights for Readability

And that’s why I love the green lights. They’re a super easy, visual way to learn how to write a blog post.

There are seven items in the Readability section. They are:

• Flesch Reading Ease
• Passive voice
• Consecutive sentences
• Subheading distribution
• Paragraph length
• Sentence length
• Transition words

The Flesch Reading Ease is a test that measures how easy your post is to read. It looks at word and sentence length, so as I mentioned above, this was pretty tricky for me! The Yoast recommendation is less than 20 words per sentence. Yipes!

For instance, here’s just one sentence from my very first post:

I got my husband the artist to write our guests’ names on the cards – thanks, Darling – then tied them with some regular kitchen string which we keep inside the stack of mixing bowls in our cupboard.

Whew! That’s 36 words, y’all! You don’t get a green light for 36 words!

(However if I’d been writing for librarians or literature people who love Proust, I wouldn’t have been as concerned. Know your audience!)

I actually really like passive voice, so I was always getting red lights for this one too. And the transition words still give me trouble. However, I’m working on it!

Lights for Optimization

Also as I mentioned above, our green lights aren’t the sole indicator of high ranking. Or any ranking, come to that. But again, it’s a great place to start. Especially if you’re a new blogger.

When I was first writing, I got some good advice about the Yoast green lights. It was to write your post first, THEN look at your lights and smiley faces. And that’s my ultimate goal.

However, as you saw with my first post, I had lots of red lights and a frowny face! Going back and tweaking that much is quite an effort. And since I still feel new to this writing thing, I continue to look at the lights a bit as I go along. I’m getting better though, and sometimes I get all the way to the end, and all the lights are green! That’s a happy moment!

Chasing the Yoast Green Lights

So at this point, I’ve done pretty well with the writing portion of this post. But I only have an orange straight-faced smiley right now, which means I have more work to do.

I’ll need to settle on my title, write a description of my post, label my photos, and a couple other things.

The Final Measurements

There. I did all those things, and here are my final measurements, above. The overall SEO smiley face is smiling, but the lights are not all green! That’s because I made a conscious decision to go with the title that felt right to me. Regardless of the lights.

But while I’m not a slave to them, they do make it so much easier to remember what needs to be done, and to do it!

And that’s what I think is the best about Yoast green lights. They’re an easy teaching tool, and chasing them is like a little game. At the end, you don’t have to have them all green. But keeping them in mind just might make your post rank higher and be more fun to read!

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