When writing a post, properly formatting the text will help increase its readability. Effective titles, body formatting, and imagery all contribute to visitors reading and sharing your content. This article explains post formatting.
Click the link at the bottom of this article to download The Perfect Blog Post reference sheet (PDF).
General guidelines
- Put your most important takeaways in the first two paragraphs. On the web, readers don't always get to the bottom of a page.
- Limit your posts to around 300 to 600 words. If you have more to write, consider splitting the text into multiple posts.
- Use headings, bullets, and lists to break up your text. Readers skip over content when they encounter a wall of text.
Post titles
Effective post titles are short, specific, and clear.
- Limit titles to 55 characters. Search engines and social media platforms may cut off long titles in their displays.
- Include the post focus keyword in the first half of the title.
- Be clear about subject of your post. The topic should be immediately understandable.
Opening paragraph
Capture the reader's attention and entice them to read more. Put your most important takeaways in the introduction. The opening paragraph may display in search results.
When writing your opening, try:
- Using a hook.
- Asking or answering a question.
- Including the focus keyword.
Body text formatting
Structuring text can make your posts easier to read. Format your post body to account for how people read text on the web.
Body structure
Format your text to make it easier for readers to scan your content for the information they need.
- Use headings to organize related paragraphs. Headings should be short and clear.
- Add a space between a paragraph and a new heading.
- Limit your paragraphs to four or five sentences.
- Limit sentences to 25 words.
- Use bullets to list out related items.
Text formatting
- Keep your text left-aligned. Centered and justified text is harder to read.
- Don't use bold and italics to add emphasis, as too much formatting interferes with readability.
- Add links to sources. Do not add footnotes; a blog is not an academic journal.
Imagery
We recommend setting a Featured Image for your post. The image will display above your post title and won't interfere with any text alignment.
If you do add an image to the post body, avoid wrapping text around it. Wrapped text is difficult to read and may not appear correctly on mobile screens or email campaigns.
Conclusion
- Summarize your ideas.
- Invite readers to add their comments and questions to the post.