Inclusive Language Analysis, New From Yoast
Real SEO isn’t about tricks and schemes to fool search engines, it’s about improving the quality of your content so it’s more valuable to people. Google is smart enough to recognize value.
For years now Yoast SEO has done a great job of doing things like adding good markup, making sure XML files are in the right place etc. That said, for the last couple years I’ve been more and more impressed as their new features have been more about making the author a better writer. The Readability tab is great, and then connecting the plugin to external services to advance it further just opens it up to a wide variety of options.
So when Taco pinged me this morning about their latest feature I was excited, but then when I saw what it was I was VERY excited. Basically it reads your content and makes you aware of when you can use more inclusive language. HeroPress has always been a strong proponent of inclusivity, so this speaks strongly to our goals.
So what does it do?
I’m just going to rip this right out of their post, because they explain it well.
It simply helps you to write content that doesn’t exclude people. Content that doesn’t alienate or even offend a portion of your audience. Which, especially as a business owner (or website owner), you don’t want to do. And that can happen easily without you even realizing it. Google also points out the importance of using inclusive language in your content. You can learn more about this in our post about inclusive language and SEO.
That’s just brilliant. I consider myself a fairly up to date ally of people in general, but as language changes and grows and people become more aware, there are new things all the time. I’m going to find this super valuable.
Here’s a picture of it in action (also stolen outright from their post).
Bonus! It’s free!
Apparently this has been available in the Premium version of the plugin for several months and I simply didn’t notice. I love the fact that they consider this feature important enough that they’re willing to add it to the free version of the plugin. They’re quite right, it is important, and this new feature will make a difference in changing how people communicate on the web.
If you try it out, please leave a comment on this post to let me know what you think of it.
Many thanks to Yoast for making this feature and many thanks to Taco for making me aware of it!
