Yoast SEO 16.4: Full readability and word forms for Czech

Over the years, we talked a lot about the importance of readable texts. We want to offer everyone the chance to understand the message that you are trying to bring across. That’s why we invest so much in our language tools like the readability analysis and our word forms feature. For Yoast SEO 16.4, we’re bringing these tools to a new language: Czech.

Readability analysis and word forms

Online content shouldn’t be complex. Making it understandable is opening up your content for an even bigger audience. Plus, search engines can better understand your content if you keep it nice and straightforward. Even with all the recent advancements in natural language processing, producing easy-to-read content still makes all the sense in the world.

Yoast SEO helps you produce high-quality and accessible content. Our writing tools and readability analyses give you tips on how to improve your writing to make it easier to reach those goals. Our analysis works for most languages, but we need to tailor some parts of the readability analysis to each specific language. We now support fifteen languages, but today we’re adding the sixteenth: Czech!

People writing in the Czech language can now use the complete readability toolset in Yoast SEO, including the word forms feature. This Premium feature makes the analysis a lot smarter by understanding the grammatical forms of your focus keyphrase.

Yoast SEO Premium not only recognizes singular and plurals but also tenses of verbs. It recognizes the singular: “dog” and it also recognizes the plural: “dogs”. It also recognizes different tenses of verbs, like “call”, “calling”, “calls” and “called”. And it adjusts your keyword optimization scores accordingly. Plus, you also get the chance to add related keyphrases and synonyms to your post.

This makes for a much more natural way of optimizing your text. Optimizing your text has never been this much fun!

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A more efficient content analysis

As you might know, we introduced our content analysis five years ago to great success. The years following that, we continued to develop the analysis to make it smarter and understand more languages. We also added awesome features like grammatical form support we talked about earlier.

Of course, all of this comes with a cost. At some point, you need to take a good look at what you built over time and find out if there are ways to improve it. We were reaching the limits of what was possible within the current architecture. Our linguist went back to the drawing board to rebuild the entire analysis.

The result is great. As we’ve rewritten everything, the analysis takes up a lot less space leading to smaller file size for the plugin. Before, all the languages we offer were downloaded in one go, while you might only need the language you are writing in. With this release, we’ve split this and only download your preferred language. We keep our plugin size down this way, and you don’t have to download things you don’t need.

Thanks to this overhaul, we are ready to kick the development of our language tools into a higher gear. Stay tuned for more!

Update to Yoast SEO 16.4 now

Yoast SEO 16.4 comes with a rewritten content analysis, plus a newly supported language: Czech. People who write in this language can now fully use our tools to improve their content. We hope you enjoy this update!