When people read content online they tend to read in an F pattern. They want to scan the content for information and keywords to find out if it’s something they really want to read or not. In fact, studies show that in most cases online readers will scan first, reading only about 20 percent of the content, and then move on if they’re not drawn into the content.
You can make the content you create easier to read if with formatting. You can set up all your content with scanning in the F pattern in mind by using bolding, italics, and header tags. Not only will it make it easier for your audience to read, but it will show search engines what’s most important in the content you’re sharing.
Header Tags
If you use WordPress for your blogs and website all titles of pages including titles of blog posts are automatically created with the H1 tag which makes the font darker, and larger than the body content. When you use that tag it shows the search engines that this is an important word and the readers notice it more, so they know that’s what the topic is about.
Using Specific Emphasis
On WordPress you can use bold, italics, underscores, capitalization, single or double quotation marks, alternate fonts, colors and combinations of all of these depending on the theme you use and the add-ons you use.
Avoid Overdoing It
Only emphasize words that are important keywords or words that you want them to notice in directions, for example. The search engines will note when you use the right tags for important words and rank your site appropriately. Using the emphasis will also help your reader scan the content efficiently. But if you do it too much it will not look as good or translate well.
Be Consistent
It’s important to set up a style sheet for your blog so that the formatting is similar in each blog post and all the content on your site. It will make it easier for your audience to read and understand if each page isn’t totally different.
Know Why You’re Adding Emphasis
Are you adding emphasis because it’s a heading, important directions, a command, a label or something else? There needs to be a reason to add emphasis to a word or else it will just look strange and distract the readers.
Follow Some Rules
There are rules that you can follow when it comes to using some forms of emphasis. For example, a heading should use one of the header tags. Books, magazines, newspapers, academic journals, films titles should all use italics.
Alternate Fonts
Sometimes it’s fun to use alternate fonts to make titles and other emphasized words stand out to your readers. You can upload new web fonts to the fonts folder of your WordPress theme using Google Fonts, CSS3 and other methods.
It’s important to use emphasis for certain words for search engines because of SEO using the header tags, but it’s also important to emphasize words using bold and italics to make it easier for your readers to scan and understand.
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