If you are publishings a post, a longer article, or other content on your site, there are several things that can convince people to read your content and optimize the reader experience for them. First, you should make sure the subject is really clear every place that someone may connect with your site including search metadata, RSS feeds, email newsletters, and social channel posts. It is also good to let the reader know how long it will take to read the article, especially if it is long-form content.
We use the Yoast SEO plugin as the default SEO tool for sites we build. We use the premium version of this plugin for our own sites and recommend it to our clients. Yoast has some great tools for optimizing your titles and descriptions in the search engines and on the major social channels. Yoast also just released a new tool that will show you the estimated reading time for a post or page and let you add it to your content with a WordPress Block Editor block. When used consistently these tools can help improve your SEO results and the reader experience.
Here is an example from a recent post on my personal blog. You can also see it above on this post. Probably not really required from the reader’s perspective for short posts like these, but it will be a nice edition to longer content that is really simple to use.
Even if you don’t want to publish the estimate publicly, you can use this feature to see the estimated reading time in the WordPress admin if you have a subscription to the Yoast SEO Premium plugin.
Here is an overview video of the feature from Yoast.
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