NB: This is the 13th installment in The Inspired Solo’s Build a Better Business Blog in One Month series. Designed to help solo lawyers and other professionals boost their blog’s performance, the series consists of a daily lecture and task (or tasks) that focus on one “blog improvement project” at a time. Each post in the series is tagged with “[BBBB1]“. You can start the program at any time. Catch up with other BBBB1 posts here.
Build a Better Business Blog, One Block At a Time
Day 13: Lecture
Format Your Blog Posts For Maximum Readability and SEO Juice
Time to get back on schedule with this thing! I do apologize on behalf of the abysmal Wild Blue and satellite internet service in general. When it rains — either literally (as it did most of last week here) or metaphorically (as it did when Michael Jackson died, taking most of my internet access with him — R.I.P.) — the internet goes bye-bye for me. Lessons learned. Anybody know a good lawyer who can get me out of this contract? Heh.
Moving on: Day 13 is all about formatting your blog posts to take advantage of SEO juice factors and to improve your site’s readability. Believe it or not, there are people in this world who actually argue passionately about the subject of white space. I know! But here’s what I gather from my admittedly scant reviews of said arguments: white space is important. Except where it isn’t.
Helpful, no? Let’s try that again, then, this time from the perspective of personal experience: white space and formatting help your readers grasp your point(s) quickly and efficiently.
This is a good thing for a couple of reasons. One: you never want your blog readers to work too hard to keep up with your brilliance. They may decide the payoff isn’t worth the effort required and go in search of easier waters to navigate.
Another reason: readability and ease of communication both build goodwill in the blog reader who doesn’t have a lot of time to spend (or doesn’t think she does, which works out to about the same thing from your perspective as the blogger) wading through her blog feeds, separating the metaphorical wheat from the virtual chaff.
So, in a nutshell: white space + formatting = happier, more loyal readers. This is an equation we can all get behind, I trust.
What do I mean by white space? Or formatting for that matter? Simply put, white space, while not necessarily white, is the space that surrounds your text. The empty space, that is. While the pros bicker back and forth with their various opinions, I can safely assert that from my limited anecdotal evidence, most readers seem to prefer some empty space around their text, especially with respect to topics that are relatively serious in nature.
Thus: If they’re trying to catch up on the latest Hollywood gossip, white space might not be that important to them. But if their foreclosure hearing is tomorrow and they need a lawyer today, they want to concentrate, and the white space either helps or is perceived to help, which — again — works out to the same thing for you, the blogger.
Formatting is simply the use of:
- bulleted and numbered (or unordered and ordered) lists;
- properly formatted links, containing both strong anchor words and descriptive title text;
- emphasized text using bolded and italicized text, or both; and
- last, but definitively not least: the use of headings
The Importance of Headings in Your Blog Posts
Remember the SEO projects we discussed earlier in this series mentioned the importance of text to the search engines. They like to see pages that match up with the keywords and provide information (i.e., text) that does a good job of elucidating those keywords, whatever they might be. One of the key features of their evaluation of your page’s value is therefore the value of the information you provide. This means for you that first and foremost, your goal as a blogger is to write really great content — the best you can manage — which is original, relevant, and spot-on with respect to the keywords.
One easy way to improve your pages’ evaluations by the search engines is to use the heading tags to create headings for your post. You can see those headings here on this page — I’ve used the h2 tags to separate the lecture from the task portion, and the h3 tags to introduce subtopics within the lecture portion. Example: the heading that precedes this section is “The Importance of Headings in Your Blog Posts” — I’ve included some of the keywords I’m aiming to optimize this page for (headings, blog, post), and phrased the heading to aid the reader in understanding the post in general and this section in particular.
Overuse of headings just looks silly — you’ll know instinctively when you’ve gone overboard with headings. But the use of a handful of headings throughout your post will juice up your SEO results and help your reader find the information she’s looking for quickly and efficiently. Readers are grateful for that kind of assistance, as a rule. You might also find, as I did, that the use of headings really helps improve your writing, too!
Use Ordered and Unordered Lists to Help the Blog Reader Grasp Your Points
Ordered (numbered) and unordered (bulleted) lists are fabulous mechanisms with a multitude of uses. They’re great for:
- Listing steps in a process
- Describing key facts
- Providing resources and URLs
- Summarizing your key points at the end of the post
- Articulating your blog post’s structure at the beginning of the post
- Communicating advantages and disadvantages of a particular set of choices
That list could go on and on; the uses of lists are really only bounded by your imagination and creativity. With respect to the last two items in that list, however, a bit more can be said: summing up your blog post’s content at the beginning and the end of the post is a very powerful method of structuring your content to help the reader grasp the main ideas. You’ve probably heard the old saw about public speaking: “Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em, tell ‘em, then tell ‘em what you told ‘em.” This is the same concept in written form — just use an ordered or unordered list to quickly sum up your main points at both the beginning and the end of the post. Now, this method isn’t appropriate for every post. I’d recommend the preview/summation list technique only for longer and more complicated posts — perhaps those pillar articles you’re working so feverishly on?
Emphasize Text in Your Blog Post Carefully
Formatting also includes the use of the strong and em tags to set apart certain text and emphasize it as compared to the rest of the post. This can be overdone, just as with the use of headings, but again the overuse of these tags is immediately visually apparent. So get in the habit of previewing all your posts before you publish them, if you don’t do so already, and make it a point to ask yourself whether the emphasis is a bit excessive.
I’ve been experimenting with emphasizing key words and phrases in my posts at my other blog, The Tramadol Diaries (and to a lesser extent here as well). I’m not sure whether I’ll continue to do this, but the few readers who’ve commented on the new formatting have had mostly positive comments about it. One said it helped her decide whether the post was helpful to the immediate question she was wondering about, because the emphasized text literally jumps off the screen at her. If those words match up with the question in her head, she’ll keep reading.
Whether others feel the same way remains to be seen, but I’m going to continue experimenting with this technique over there for the time being, just to see what happens. If it’s something you’d like to try on your blog, I’d be very interested to know the results, so please drop me a line and let me know!
Link Formatting for Best SEO and User Experience Results
As for links, the essential points to remember are to always use the “title” attribute in your HREF tag, and to make sure your anchor text (the text that the user clicks on in the link) is relevant to the linked-to site. Stay away from cutesy puns, “click here”, “more here” and the like. Also, ensure multiple links aren’t too close together on the page; it’s easy for a reader to miss one if you put successive links to a string of words in one sentence, for instance.
Day 13 Task: Reformat An Old Post to Be More Readable and Search-Engine-Friendly
Your task for today is to take an old post from your archives and reformat it to add lists, emphasized text, and headings.
For extra credit, take a reading of that page in your Google Analytics dashboard to see what kind of stats the page has received thus far, then check them again in a few weeks to see if there’s been an improvement. There may or may not be — this isn’t a guarantee, and anyone who promises you a certain result in SERPs is selling you a large bridge in Brooklyn, in my opinion — but overall, this approach will improve your chances of better SERP results.
