A good readable post is the lifeline of any blog. Many times bloggers forget a few simple details that can differentiate between a good post and a great post. I myself try to improve on them everyday and there is never any end to the amount of tweaking you can do to make your blogs posts more readable, easier to understand and to make the reader look forward to the next one.

5 Ways to Better Configure a Blog Post

1. Structure - A post is like a short story that should have a Beginning, a Middle and an End. The beginning should summarize what you are about to talk about, the middle is obviously for the main content and the end should again give a brief summary of what you just talked about. It is always good to end with a question or what you learned from your post to encourage readers to comment.
2. Title and Headings - Your title should not be too long or too short. Be descriptive and focused, play around with a few variations before deciding on the title. Remember to write for your audience not for a search engine.
   Also breaking up content into paragraphs and giving headings could work as well. This is for cases where you might be writing a review perhaps.
3. Links - While giving links out one important thing I don’t see a lot is the links don’t open in new windows. The first impulse of a reader is to click on a link so make it open in a new window it is as simple as this < a href=”http://www.example.com” target=”_blank” >Example< /a >. This makes them to not stray away from your site and continue reading, as well as read more posts.
4. Spacing - You should configure the spacing in your css stylesheet for paragraphs, unordered lists, ordered lists and blockquotes. The more distinctive every aspect of each of these properties looks from the margin to the padding, font and font size, line-height and others the more readable and appealing it will look to the eye.
5. Bold, Italics, Underlines and Strikethrough - Use them wisely just not over excessively. They are good for providing points of reference to a reader when you want to really stress something. Plus people usually skim through the entire post first and if they find a keyword which is bold they will most probably end up reading the whole thing.

Bonus -

• Images - Place images either at the top or at the end of your post, leave the middle for the content. If it is a big image resize it { ex. height=”150″ width=”150″ } and make it open in a new window with { target=”_blank” }. If you want your text to go around the image then use any of the codes below, sometimes a ‘div’ tag won’t sit properly in a blog template, this template doesn’t accept it for some odd reason. So I use the table code. { remove the spaces between the “<” & “>” symbols while implementing }.
• < div style=”margin: 3px; float: right;” >< img src=”image url here” / >< /div > you can change ‘float:right;‘ for ‘float:left;‘
• < table align=”right” border=”0″ cellpadding=”0″ cellspacing=”0″ >
  < tbody >
  < tr >
  < td >< img src=”image url here” / >< /td >
  < /tr >
  < /tbody >
  < /table > you can change ‘align:right;‘ for ‘align:left;‘

I hope these tips help you in making your blog posts more readable and friendly to your readers. Don’t forget to spell check!

If you have any tips or tricks you use share them with us by commenting.

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About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.