Blogging is one of my favorite forms of expression. It allows me to be verbose (an occasional shortcoming), yet take a conversational tone. I can be casual, funny, informative or all of the above. It allows me to demonstrate expertise in my area(s) of interest.
Blogging is fun, especially when readers engage your posts. To gain and grow your readership, you want to make sure your blog develops and maintains good readability.
Readability refers to the ease the reader has in reading your online content, be it on a website or in a blog post. Here are a few tips on increasing the readability of your blog.
1. Target Your Headlines
Whether or not the headline is the first thing you write, you should revisit it before hitting “Publish” to ensure it includes your target keywords or phrases.
Including your keywords in headlines, a few times within the post’s content, image alt tags (descriptive text about the image), etc. should help with your post’s search ranking.
But first and foremost, your headline should hint at what the reader can expect to get from the post.
2. Set the Tone up Front
By revealing a personal flaw and flat out stating that blogging allows me to take a conversational tone, I immediately give you the tone of this blog post.
What you don’t want to do is crack a joke up front and leave the reader hanging by paragraph four with dry, drab content.
Like many of these tips, the key is to develop and maintain consistency throughout the post.
3. Include Imagery
Include images! Imagery creates depth, adds interest to a post and makes it more enticing when shared socially.
My rule is to include a single image toward the top of a post whenever possible. I’ll grab and use a photo from Flickr that’s cleared for commercial use (with reference to the photographer) if I don’t have an applicable one in my personal collection.
4. Minimize Paragraph Length
How often do you read a 10-sentence Facebook post in its entirety? Rarely.
Online we are like raccoons. Online we are like little children. Online – and this includes your readers – bright shiny objects easily distract us and divert our attention.
Everything in the world is competing for our attention, so you should do what you can to help hold the attention of your readers.
Giant blocks of text will drive your reader away. See how I’ve broken up this tip? Follow my lead.
5. Develop Consistency
I have developed a very rigid consistency for my personal music blog that is maintained in EVERY SINGLE POST. It begins with a header image at a mandatory, set width, continues with content, and concludes with some form of embedded media.
You don’t have to be that specific in your consistency. Your method could merely state that every post should include an image and that no paragraph should exceed five lines.
Having a standardized consistency in your blog posts fulfills expectations readers didn’t know they had. It keeps things simple, organized and on track.
» Further Reading
There are likely countless other tips that will help increase the readability of your blog and the posts within it. Two blogs I particularly enjoy that cover readability on occasion include Copyblogger and Read Write.
If you find articles you like at one or both of these locations, feel free to share them in the comments.
Above photo courtesy Gary Cheeseman.