I have many pet peeves when I am reading blogs on a daily basis, one of them is post structure. I am one of the most impatient people on earth, and I take the time to set up what I hope is an easy to read article. I have come up with 6 tips to help make your site easier to read and in turn will keep your readers coming back.

Title:

Take the time to think about your title, put your keywords first and don’t make it a paragraph by itself. The could be the most important words in your article. Usually the title is the call to action for someone to click through to your article. I usually change the title tag to make sure my keywords are prominent.

Paragraphs:

This one is also very important, if you jumble 500 words together and there are no paragraph breaks, chances are most people will not finish reading it. I have seen articles that have paragraphs but there is no line space between the paragraphs too, it gives me a headache when I try to read these kinds of blog posts.

Headings:

Use h3 and h4 (or whatever heading you like, I prefer 3’s and 4’s for my site) headings to break up your article into sub-topics. This allows for someone like me that reads as many as 75 articles a day to skim for the information that I am interested in. Use good titles in your headings too, I have seen articles put words like “and..” or “also…” in an h4 heading and that doesn’t tell me anything about that paragraph or group of paragraphs.

Lists:

  • Use Lists
  • This one has bullets
  • Others are numbered
  • If you are listing points it helps to use a list
  • The eyes are drawn to lists

Quotes:

If you are quoting someone, or citing a resource, put the text in quotes. Again, the eyes are drawn to quotes the same way they are drawn to lists. A good example is this quote from Steven Wright:

If you were going to shoot a mime, would you use a silencer?

If you have never inserted quotes on a Wordpress blog, the picture on the right shows the buttons while you are adding a post, the 6th one from the left that has ” symbol is the button that creates the quote.

Pictures:

Pictures are not required, but if I have one related to my post, or if I think one belongs in it, then I try to add one. Not only does it help make your article look better, it is a great place to add text (alt text) describing the picture which should include keywords.

Update: Bold and Italics:

Gabe over at Free Blog Help suggested I add this to the list and he was right, so use bold and italics on words you want to stand out, I will even bold a keyword every now and then. Don’t go crazy with it, and for heavens sake, don’t write your entire post in bold or italics! Also you can use both bold and italic together. Thanks for the tip Gabe! (if you aren’t subscribed to his blog, you should be!)

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