Make your Blog Readable

That sounds silly… why wouldn’t a blog be readable, right? It’s a blog; you read it, pretty simple, right? Well, the point I am making is that it should be reader friendly.  You take the time to put valuable content on your website, make the SEO efforts to drive traffic to your website and land them on a specific blog or page on your website, you want them to stay there and read or wander your site, right?  So, be sure when they get there that they find what they are looking for, easily and your website is visually appealing.

You got them there, now keep them there

Once you have visitors landing on your website, you want to be sure the content on your website, to include your blogs are reader friendly so they will stay. If they are confused or look at your content as just words on a page that they will have to read the whole thing to get the gist of what you are saying, you will lose them.

So how do you keep them there?

Readers want to be able to skim the page and look for things that apply directly to them or to their situation and business. Not everything you write will be 100% necessary for 100% of the folks that land on that given page.  So, what you have to do is make it to where they can skim for what is important to them.

• Photos and graphics that apply to the text will help tell the story and thus can advise the reader what that section is about. Should they determine that it is applicable; they will read and continue reading.
• Break your sections out with titles or headings. This helps break up long paragraphs of writing in a simpler way than just a paragraph break, plus, you provide a separation between the points and tell them what the next paragraph will be about.
  • Keep in mind that using header tags <h2> is also a great way to pre-format (size and font) your text by using styles in your word processing.
  • Plus, it’s great for search engine optimization as well.
• Utilize bulleted or numbered lists so they can read the items and see some sort of separation between the points and they know if they read the first few words that the bullet will continue about that same theme. Like this bullet is about bulleted lists, you got that from the first few words.
• Utilize bold, italics or underlines to emphasize your main points, however, be very careful not to overdo this. Keep in mind that underlining is usually associated with links so I would be less inclined to use underlines over bold or italics.
• Similarly, using colored text can be used to draw eyes to certain keywords. Keep in mind that this needs to be done to a minimum as too many colors or actions going on within your text can confuse the eyes and you could lose the reader.

Give them more

Should you have a blog or content that could be clarified or explained, you may not want to do it on that blog, but maybe you already did in another blog.  This is a great opportunity to provide them with that additional information via an internal link to that other blog or service.  By the way, this is great for search engine optimization too!

Provide a call to action

Clearly you have a point of having them on a website, be sure they can easily find your contact information and know what you are offering them as far as services or products so they can act on that information.  Nothing like having great content and letting the reader just leave or worse, that they have to search to find out how to contact you.

I hope these ideas have been helpful for understanding the reader as well as providing additional value on your website for the search engines.  Should you have further questions about website readability and functionality of your website or search engine optimization I provide 1-on-1 consultations for you to DIY (do it yourself) as well as classes, or I offer these services to do it for you.  However, should you have further questions; I would love to hear from you.  Contact me to so I can help you.

~Kristen