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It’s taken me a while to implement formatting of my articles on this blog. But since I’ve really been trying, my readership has grown as has my page views.

I’m still amazed at the bloggers who have a huge lump of text in thier post. I’ve even seen the whole post be one giant 600 word block. Even I couldn’t read through it all without wishing it would end.

Formatting your blog and making it user friendly includes using paragraphs and sectioning. Remember, most blog readers are skimmers. They’ll skim right over most of your text.

Who Wants $10?

Don’t believe me? When I did the post about sponsored links in WordPress Themes, I buried a challenge in the post. The challenge was that I would pay someone $10 if they could tell me how many embedded links are in a WordPress default install.

Although that page was linked-to pretty heavy and I received a good amount of traffic to it, few guessed at the right number. Most I believe skimmed right over it and never saw the challenge. So from now on, I’ll be leaving little challenges like that in my post, just to see who’s paying attention! By the way, the challenge in that article is over, no one guessed the right number, keep reading to find the next challenge buried in an upcoming article.

How To Format Your Blog for Reader Loyalty and Ease of Use

Here’s how to ad some formatting to your blog to make it more user friendly.

• Use bullet points for list (like this one) - Bullet points tend to break the text up and make list easier to read
• Use the <H3> tag for section headers - I believe the H3 tag is underused by many bloggers. Instead of using the <Strong> tag for section heading, use the <H3> and make your post easier to read and increase your SEO. Some search engines like Yahoo and MSN thrive with on page optimization.
• Bold Keywords - If I click on a site and see many of my keywords, I tend to stay around the site longer reading relevant information. If I click on the same site and see a huge blog of text, I don’t bother. So do many other people. Use the <Strong> tag to bold keywords in your article.
• Use the <em> tag - The <em> tag is the same as the <i> Italics tag. Use italics to make quotes or your powerful thoughts jump out on the page. Italics pull peoples attention span out of “skim” mode. More so than the <Strong> tag if you ask me.
• Keep paragraphs short - I’m bad about this, but I’m getting better! Don’t go on and on forever. Keep the sentences focused and on point…yeah…I’m guilty of this one also

It doesn’t take long to break some paragraphs up into sections, use some bulleted list and bold some keywords. This will make your blog “Skimable” and will make many of your readers happy!