Making your blog posts readable

Have you ever been to a blog and found that the content is hard to read? It could be because the text size is too small or the blog post just has one big block of content. Even some of my favorite blogs suffer from these issues and sadly I have even written a few posts like that myself. This problem has bugged me for awhile, and I decided to come up with a few tips that might help readers and bloggers alike.

Headings - jazz up your content with H1, H2 and H3 headings. You can place headings on the top of each paragraph or you can use headings to split your content into different sections. This improves the overall readability of the content, as well as makes it easy to skim the content.
Bold/italics - bold or italicize important phrases within your blog content. Many people do not like reading long blog posts, so if you bold or italicize important text it allows those types of readers to easily skim your posts.
Lists/bullets - list out items when you can. It makes it a lot easier to read items in a list format compared a paragraph.
Pictures - add some eye candy to your posts. People love pictures as long as they don't take hours to load and they are relevant to the text.
Links - share the link love by linking to related sites, it will add color to the text and readers will click on them as long as they are relevant to the content.
Block quotes - the content on your web site does not always have to be yours. Block quotes allow you to quote others and feed off of their words. It is a simple thing that is built into most blogging softwares, but it can make things easier to read.

You do not have to use all of these elements in your blog posts, but even a few can make things easier to read. Try them out; you don't have much to lose.

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edgar, August 23, 2006

did you put this totally not relevant picture just to check that your readers are reading conscientiously ?

Doug Karr, August 23, 2006

You're dead on! I've seen my readership increase as I do this. In fact, I recently put an emphasis on blockquotes. There's a CSS trick to it, but I think it stands out well! Take a look to see.

Great post!

Neil Patel, August 23, 2006

Edgar, yea I put the picture as a joke hoping someone would say something. (I know, some of my humor is lame)

Owen Lystrup, August 23, 2006

Some good advice here.

Since, most people read blogs through RSS feeds, isn't some of this not as important?

Just a question.

I definitely think more bloggers should put some effort into making better headlines. Most bloggers write really crappy headlines and make me not want to read the post.

Neil Patel, August 23, 2006