Five simple ways to improve your blog posts

03.02.2016 4 min read

I go through lots of blog posts each day and oh boy how they can be difficult to read. I have collected here a handful of the most common things to improve in blog posts, to make them more readable and simply better for your readers. All and all you should remember that your blog post is by far not the only thing people are likely to be reading online during a day (or even an hour).

Many of them come straight to your blog posts, through social media or search engines. They are not likely to click through your site if their initial experience is shitty. Some of these things may require redesign or getting a new theme or whatnot. Some of these things you can add in your next blog post without changing anything in the design.

1. Simplify

Simplifying your blog posts doesn't only apply on the design. You don't have to drop that sidebar, if you have some real reason for using it. Nor you have to remove the email form from below your posts. As a matter of fact below the blog post is a great place for the email form. But there are really wild looking blog posts out there these days.

In order to amplify the impact you are messing your posts with tons of subheadings, bolding, italic styling, varying text sizes, short paragraphs and images. It's making your blog posts impossible to read. Try and read through one of your messy blog posts. Or better yet, ask someone else to read and tell them to be completely honest about the readability.

2. Use bigger font(s)

This is a matter of design, but if you know how to adjust the text size of your blog (it's usually set in body-styling), make it bigger. If not, get yourself a better blog design/theme or someone to (help you) to fix the size. Especially on smaller screens, such as smartphones, a legible font size has an emphasised importance.

But even on desktop devices and other bigger screens, not all the people browsing your site have the eyesight of a bird of prey. You can test the mobile friendliness, including the text size at Google's Mobile-Friendly Test and also their PageSpeed Insights gives a note about font size legibility (it's in the User Experience area of the Mobile section).

3. Make links pop

Another matter of design and may require getting a new theme or help with fixing your current design. Either way, if you want to get people to click your links, make them distinct. Don't rely only on colour, since colour blindness may render your colour indistinct from the rest of the text. But also don't use only italic or other styling to make your links look like links. Underlining is generally considered as a sign of a link on a website. So refrain from using underlining in other than links. Of course if you don't want anyone to click your links, then keep making them obscure. But then again, why would you add the links at all, if you don't want them to be clicked?

4. Add alt texts to images

This is a basic thing, but often forgotten. Add alternate text to your images. On WordPress (as an example) the alt text can be added in the media uploader and different blogging platforms provide different ways to add the alt texts in the images. In the most basic way to add alt in images is to add it straight in the img tag. Like so:

<img alt="This is the alt text" src="image.jpg"></img>

There are multiple reasons for doing this. For one, if your images aren't loading for any reason, the alt text is shown instead. Another, more important reason, is that alt text is the one that screen readers can read. Screen readers are used by people who have diminished eyesight or cannot see at all. And the screen readers are not capable of "reading" images. However, they are capable of reading alt texts. Third reason, in case you aren't quite convinced yet, is that the search engines read alt texts. Thus they can be used to optimise your blog posts to search engines, even improve your blog post's search visibility.

5. Tell who wrote it

There are so many blogs out there, and so many scammers and spammers taking advantage of blogging, you must make sure people will know who is behind this particular blog post. Not everyone will bother to click to your about or start page, whatever you are calling it. Plus this will help your personal branding, when your blog post is not just "some blog post", but a blog post by a certain person.

You can do this very simply, by adding your name or signature on the bottom of your posts. Or you can add a more definitive description in the end of each post, with your photo and all. Or if you utilise that sidebar, drop your photo and short description on the top of it. Don't be vague about who is the person behind your blog posts. The more personality, the better.

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