2018·09·30 · 3:46
Interview with Joost De Valk
A short clip from a longer interview where I discuss the Yoast SEO traffic light system and why we built it the way we did. I explain our shift from a keyword-based approach toward key phrases, why recognizing language variations matters, and how SEO behaves differently depending on which language you are writing in. I also touch on why keyword density remains relevant in smaller language markets like Dutch even as it matters less in English.
0:11 so let's have a talk about the software itself in the interface and the usability you said that you don't think it's it's great but one of the things that people you know rave about and rant about is the traffic light system that you created which obviously is a very easy get but also I've seen people lose their mind over the fact that they can't get the green lights do you still a fan of your traffic light system do you think you should have more colors in it what we are working on is
0:44 to make it slightly more like Google so to make it we for the longest time we've we've refer to one focused keyword and we've we've been slightly too keyword based the problem is that getting away from keyword based is very hard the way we run the analysis so what you have to realize that we run all that analysis in your browser so that doesn't run anywhere else that runs in JavaScript in your browser doesn't go to our servers so we what we had to do was figure out
1:15 how to become better at that while not blowing up your browser um so we're very close to a major release of the SEO in which we will move from key word to key phrase and in which we will move from single like will only recognize it if it's in exactly that order to recognizing it in more different shapes and forms and automatically recognizing florals for instance of singles and things like that
1:48 that has taken about a year's worth of development and for language scientists in our team to get well and we've got it done for English now yeah oh it's up to us to done expand it to all the other languages well the thing is I think what people like about Yoast is its simplicity you know the focus keyword still talks about keyword density which always kind of makes me feel a bit itchy that's one of the things that goes away with that yeah go away it's just that we talk about it differently yes I the the funny
2:19 thing is that in the SEO world you've got two groups of people you've got two people that don't want to talk about queue or don't see because it's better and you shouldn't talk about talk about that that's all the people doing SEO in English and then if you're doing SEO in languages that Google is not as good at then Kirra density suddenly becomes very important so this is a finger there's really three four five different types of content SEO depending on how how
2:51 proficient Google is at recognizing your language their large maturity of the documentation about SEO is in English and about English language SEO but even for me that's not my native language and when I write in Dutch Dutch is a very small language area there's only number twenty five million people in the world that speak Dutch there's like ten million web sites in Dutch so there's a lot of stuff to be ranked for in Dutch where the ranking algorithm is actually different from the English one and were keyword density
3:23 unfortunately matters more than it does in English it's a hard story to to tell and it's especially as we are worldwide and we have uses on every continent it [Music]