SmartCrawl’s newest version release comes with an impressive new feature—support for Multilingual Readability.
Up to this point, the readability test in SmartCrawl could be used solely to calculate a score for posts or pages written in the English language.
Now, depending on what language you have set up in WordPress settings, SmartCrawl will use a different formula to calculate the readability score for a number of languages.
Our SEO analysis engine currently supports the following:
- Czech
- Dutch
- French
- German
- Italian
- Russian
- Spanish
In this article, we’re going to take a look at this helpful new feature, and touch on a few related ones as well.
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Along with Multilingual Readability support, Post SEO Analysis will also support the above languages.
The Post SEO Analysis feature reads the page content and how it’s displayed in the frontend, then provides SEO recommendations based on the content added.
Having support for 7 languages will provide more accurate recommendations, as it uses different formulas for each one.
Let’s take a look at these settings in SmartCrawl.
Multilingual Readability
The key to learning is understanding. It’s not just about speaking in a language your audience comprehends; it’s presenting your words in a manner that is easily understood.
Since 1847, scholars have been measuring difficulty level in reading copy. Many indexes exist that measure readability of the English text— SMOG, Gunning fog, Automated, Coleman-Liau, and more.
All of these indexes convert readability to a mathematical formula, indicating how well your readers can comprehend the text. Although the formulas differ, they consistently place heavy emphasis on these two factors: sentence length and word length.
SmartCrawl uses the Flesch-Kincaid Test. What is that exactly? Read on…
The Flesch-Kincaid Test
Lawyer, author, and writing consultant Rudolph Flesch advocated the use of phonics rather than sight reading to enable students to sound-out unfamiliar words, a method often called “look-say”.
Flesch penned many books, the most famous probably being “Why Johnny Can’t Read, and What You Can Do About It”.
In 1943, Flesch published a readability formula in his dissertation, “Marks of a Readable Style.” That formula, the Flesch Reading Ease index, was the original Flesch test.
Flesch’s work with the Associated Press helped bring the reading level of front-page newspaper stories down by five grade levels. Implementing this formula increased Publishers readership by 40% to 60%.
In 1976, the U.S. Navy commissioned J. Peter Kincaid and his team to recalculate the Flesch Reading Ease to help sailors absorb Navy training manuals faster and understand them better.
The resulting formula was the Flesch-Kincaid Test, which is now a standard for the U.S. Department
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This article was written by Janette Burhans and originally published on WPMU DEV Blog.