How Transition Words Improve Readability and SEO

Can search engines actually filter articles that are easy and natural to read from bad ones? However, the search engines don't have a feature to rank articles based on their readability. But how? This is how it goes!

How does readability affect SEO?

The common direct things that search engines can rank your article for are:

• Keyword density
• Keyword decorations
• Meta tags
• Image alt tags
• Grammar of your article
• Page title
• URL

In this case, writers consider most about the above mentioned fact instead of how indirectly readability improve SEO. User behaviour, Typography,Content readability, and Style of Writing are the factors that search engines use to rank articles indirectly.

Content Readability

Content readability of any of your articles represents how easy can your visitors understand your written content.

The important thing that you should always keep in mind when writing any of your content is that you are making it primarily for your visitors. As important as it is to rank good for particular keywords on search engines, if your articles can't be understood with ease by your audience, they won't have the informational value your visitors deserve. When your articles can be easily understood by readers, they would often come to read and spend a lot of time reading articles. It is how user behavior fluctuates. According to user behavior, these are the factors that search engines consider in improving SEO.

• Time on page
• Exit rate
• Bounce rate
• Social sharing rate
• Conversion rate
• Total number of sessions

You can see those things clearly lined up in Google anaylitics.

In typography, using charm fonts, writing short sentences, writing short paragraphs, avoiding passive voice improves readability too. Conversational writing helps to improve readability and SEO. Readers would love when the article is written in a conversational way. Typography and style of writing cause good user behavior too.

What are Transition Words?

Transition words are words or phrases used to link ideas together. They help the reader to see more than one point is important and both should be taken into consideration. They also indicate different ideas in the same paragraph or sentence are related.

Let's get into the different types of transitions to make the concept clearer. This won't give you the full list of transition words but will make it possible to easily recognize them. There are different types of transition words that you can use such as,

• Additive Transitions: Use to show addition, introduction, similarity to other ideas.
• Adversative Transitions: Use to signal conflict, contradiction concession, dismissal.
• Causal Transitions: Use to signal cause/effect and reason/result, etc.
• Sequential Transitions: Use these transitions to signal a chronological or logical sequence.

Word list extracted from msu.edu.

How Transition Words Improve Readability

Readers' ease is everything. When readers feel comfortable and interested in reading articles, they prefer engaging more in readable articles. When using transition words, the exact idea that you are trying to say is clearly could be emphasized: so you ought to do nothing more with the reader's mentality and understanding, transition words already there! Transitions make your writing well structured. It creates a good readable environment for the readers. And therefore they contribute to SEO in the long run, by attracting more traffic and visitors to your website. Moreover, using transition words makes your articles clearer and more logical. Also, it contributes to making the meaning more intuitive and the text more engaging.

Now let's see an example with transition words and without transition words.
Without transitions

The above is not easy to understand. Now, check the next one.

With transitions

Yoast suggests that transition words highlight the relationship between phrases, sentences or even paragraphs. Transition words make it easier for your readers to understand how thoughts and ideas are connected. They also prepare your readers for what's coming. You may have or you can experience transition optimizing in WordPress. WordPress convince WordPress bloggers to use transition words in writing with the help of Yoast.

Improving readability and SEO is not that hard if you learn and apply them in writing articles. Do not waste time searching for transition words, just use the list given in this article. If you have any questions, suggestions please feel free to comment below. Happy Writing!✌

Originally published on Hyvor Talk Blog. Hyvor Talk is a commenting platform for blogs. We also help our users to grow by sharing tips and blog posts.