Conversion Matters

This is going to be a little look into blog post usability. Being able to write well for the web or for your blog will be an important factor in how successful your blog is.

If people are unable to easily digest your content, they’re not going to share it or link to it. If you’re an unknown blogger in the bloated blogosphere, by at least creating coherent and well structured posts you’ll already be ahead of a lot of people.

Basic spelling, grammar and punctuation

I’m not saying you’re never allowed to make a typo or the odd misspelling but I just won’t read your content if you try and rite it lyk itz a txt msg. Please use full stops so we can pause for breath while reading and commas where appropriate. It’s just polite.

There’s absolutely no reason in turning off your audience by making it painful for them to consume your content.

Descriptive headings

Try and write useful, descriptive headings for every post that are catchy and contain a targeted keyword/phrase. This has multiple benefits.

Firstly, people will know what they are about to read and people won’t be reading it if they’re not interesting in the article, so you should have interested people reading what you have to say.

Secondly by making your titles catchy you have more chance of more people reading your article. This can be especially important if you’re attempting to submit articles and posts to social media sites. The title is often the only thing that you have to sell your story initially on a social news site.

Thirdly, by including a keyword or phrase in your title, your gaining some SEO points by adding your targeted phrases to ‘important’ (<h1><title>) parts of the page.

Sub headings

Following on from headings, sub headings (<h2>,<h3> etc) are an important tool you can use to make your posts more readable. By splitting up your articles into logical, titled sections it’s a) easier for people to read and scan the article and b) easier for people to find what they’re looking for quickly. This is especially important when you’re writing long articles.

Lists

If it is appropriate, use a list. They’re very easy to digest and scan quickly and are well suited to writing on the web. A lot of the stories that make the digg front page or the top of del.icio.us seem to be lists of some form or another.

I’m all in favour of a short set of bullet points at the start of a post detailing what is going to follow, if it will help me make a decision as to whether or not I want to read the post.

Proof read your posts

The final thing you need to do is proof read and preview every post. The amount of times I’ve accidentally forgotten to close a <strong> tag, or something similar, always amazes me and has forced me into the habit of previewing every post.

It’s unprofessional if your readers are seeing poorly formatted posts because you forgot to close a tag and it doesn’t take long to have a quick check over before you post. It also helps you spot typos and gives you the opportunity to edit or rewrite sections where appropriate.

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