We live in a world where people have very short attention spans. We’re bombarded by so much content every single day, we can’t possible read and consume it all. The solution we have developed is to scan things quickly and decide if we want to invest the time to read the article, watch the video, or listen to the podcast.
Our blog readers are no different. That’s why it is important to format your posts in a way that makes it easy to scan, get a quick idea of what the post is about, and then make a decision about reading it. That’s what formatting is all about. It’s an important step in your blogging process.
Add to that the fact that formatting is also an important part of on- page SEO and it is something you should be paying a lot of attention to.
Formatting For Your Readers
Always start by formatting for your readers. While search engines are important, they won’t do you any good if you can’t convince people to read your post.
Make It Easy To Scan the Content
The most important thing you can do for your readers is to make it easy to scan the content. Use headlines, break up text, etc. to make it quick and easy to scan the post and figure out what it’s about. Of course your headline and your images are a big part of this.
Break Up Things into Bulleted or Numbered Lists
Breaking up things, tips, ideas, etc. into lists. Depending on context, those could be bulleted or numbered lists.
Lists are easy to ready, quick to scan, and help readers consume your content.
Keep Your Paragraphs Short
Reading online is different from reading a print book or newspaper. It’s much harder on the eyes, and since we’re consuming so much written content on a daily basis and scan a lot, our attention span when it comes to reading has gone down quite a bit.
Make it easy on your readers to read your posts by keeping your paragraphs short. One to three sentences is usually all you want in each.
Bold important Concepts
Highlight the most important concepts or key words of your post by bolding them. Not only does this help readers understand an important point, it also helps with scanning before they commit to read your post.
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All great points .I try to keep sentences short and plenty of white space.
I really need to go back and learn how to do better spacing on my blog. A lot of good points, thanks for the reminder!
All good suggestions. I struggle with thinking of good heading. I will try to work on this.
I always used bolding in grant proposals and reports. Good reminder to use this strategy in my blog.
Once again, thanks!