20 Tips for Making Your Inbound Marketing Blog More Readable

Through experimentation and practice, inbound marketing professionals have developed a laundry list of tried and true tricks guaranteed to increase your blog's readability and keep readers coming back for more.

1. Create visual distinction between your post and the rest of the page. The start and end of each post should be clear.
2. Keep it short. Short posts. Short paragraphs (2-3 sentences). Short sentences.
3. Create logical structure and flow (title, intro, heading, text, etc.) and use it consistently to give your site cohesiveness.
4. Choose a common font that most readers are likely to have.
5. Use larger fonts, bold, underlines or color to make headings and subheads stand out. Be consistent in application.
6. Set space between lines in a paragraph to 1.5 (line height divided by font size should equal about 1.5).
7. Pull quotes from the blog body to entice interest. Highlight with italic or bold type or by placing in colored boxes.
8. Underline links so they're easy to spot.
9. Skip SnapShots links. They may seem cool, but quickly become annoying and disruptive.
10. Don't break up posts with ads; it disrupts readability. Place ads below the post or to the side.
11. Shorten sidebars so they don't compete with content.
12. Italic and bold type call enough attention to themselves. Don't distract the reader by making them a different color than the body type.
13. Avoid all caps in body text; they're hard to read.
14. Avoid large text blocks that can intimidate readers. Break up text with bold type or bullets and lists.
15. Indent bulleted and numbered lists to differentiate them from text paragraphs.
16. Left align text for best readability.
17. Make pagination navigation clear and clickable. Add the option to read the entire article on a single page.
18. Expand acronyms using acronym HTML code with the typical dotted bottom border.
19. Place images at the beginning of a post to draw in readers. Top right placement captures greatest reader attention.
20. Check text wrapping around images and adjust text or resize image to create a pleasing fit.

How readable are your blogs? We can help.

Photo credit: margolove