A Blog Blog Question Mk. III: Visually Appealing Words?

As has been mentioned here before, writing regular blog updates for your website is a good way to: A) give your visitors a reason to keep coming back; and B) keep Google and other search engines coming back, too. The more new content you can put on your site, the better!

For part B, nearly any content will do the trick. It’s certainly better if you can write something about your company or products, with a few relevant terms in it, but almost anything you write—as long as it contains actual words—will count as new content as far as search engines are concerned. 

However, while any new content essentially does the trick for search engines, the same cannot be said for the visitors to your site. Not only does your content need to be relevant and interesting to keep visitors coming back, it should be pleasing to the eye, as well.

Pleasing to the eye? Check!

Not necessarily visually appealing—it doesn’t need to “look pretty,” per se. But it does need to be appealing in a certain way for readers to want to read it. There are several considerations you can make while writing to entice your readers to, um, read.

 How to Make Your Blog Writing “Visually Appealing”

• Break up “walls of text.” Huge blocks of words, words, words can be quite intimidating, and make readers turn away. While what you’ve written may technically be correct in just two long paragraphs, try breaking them up into smaller paragraphs of three or four sentences. Smaller paragraphs = easier to read.
• Use bullet points or a numbered list. If people can see at a glance that you’ve got four points to make, for example, they’re much more likely to read all the way through and get all the info you’re trying to give them. If you’ve just got a pile of paragraphs, the “I’m in a hurry here” types will skim through or stop reading after the first few paragraphs.
• Add a picture. This is basically just another way to break up your wall of text, but it also plays into the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Rather than spend nine sentences describing your company’s new deluxe widget, use a picture with just a few supporting sentences. It’s fast, easy, and is literally visually appealing.
• Use headers to break up your post. Think of them as new chapters in a book—everyone likes getting to the next chapter, so readers will be more inclined to read on through your “next chapters.”

Keep these tips in mind when writing new blog posts for your company’s website. You probably won’t be able to use them all in every post—sometimes none of them may work. But remember, what you write doesn’t have to be Shakespeare. Just make it relevant, interesting, and if you can, visually appealing.

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