Originally Published on January 25th, 2018. Updated for November 10th, 2020.
Crafting a beautiful blog post that compels your readers and supports your website’s SEO goes beyond keywords and good grammar. In fact, the structure of your blog text can be just as important as the words themselves. Learning how to format a blog post for SEO and readability is a small step, but it will pay off in the long run.
Structure
Every high-ranking blog post has a great structure. It keeps the writing on topic, and makes it easy for Google — and your readers — to understand the subject matter. Use this structure in combination with keywords and quality content to help boost your blog post’s SEO.
Treat your Blog Post like an Outline
Do you remember outlining book reports in school? The same principle applies when formatting a great blog post. Here’s an example:
Blog Post Title
- Introduction
- Heading 1
- text
- Heading 2
- text
- Subheading 1
- text
- Subheading 2
- text
- Conclusion
When you format a blog post to have a clear hierarchy and structure, your content flows more naturally and is much easier to read.
Headings and Subheadings
Headings and subheadings are extremely important for the SEO of blog posts, and for readability too. Search engine crawlers use them to determine the topics covered, while readers use them to quickly understand the subject matter. There are no hard rules on the ideal number of headings in a blog post; just use at least one or two, and make sure they accurately reflect what the content is about.
Amount of Text
No one likes reading a big block of text, especially on computers or mobile devices. Improve your blog post’s readability – and SEO – by breaking up paragraphs and sections into manageable chunks of information. Write smaller paragraphs, and insert a couple of subheadings for extra structure. Using bulleted or numbered lists is another great practice.
Make Your Blog Good-Looking
Knowing how to format a blog post is an integral part of writing a good-looking blog post that ranks well in search engine results. Outline your blog posts with headings, keep those paragraphs short, and add a list or two. The result: a well-structured blog post that readers and search engines will easily understand.
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