45 tips for good blog writing : everything you need to know

The impact of writing skill is essential in the hypertext environment of the Internet. Change the title of a topic, a title or a link, and you can vary the playback rate corresponding to a ratio of 1 to 10. Visitors behave extremely fugitive; to be read, you must be brief, explicit and informative. Inspired by the user experience, this article, which wants to be very concrete, summarizes a small own advices in writing blogs.

 

Article Summary:

 

We will discuss the article with the following sub headers:

• Titles
• Introduction of the article
• The content of article
• Links
• Images

 

Titles

 

1. Provide essential title for every page.
2. The title should be descriptive, yet not a story itself, between 4 and 70 words. Ideally, the title should fit on one line. Try to eliminate all adjectives, prepositions, adverbs.
3. Visible: Should stand in an area of ??the page, just above the content. Use a font size larger than the body text. Think using italics, underline or uppercase.
4. Explicit: The vocabulary understood by the audience. Describing the best contents of the page and has added value (Anticipation of the content). Should be without acronym, abbreviation or idiosyncrasies. Idiosyncracy means a structural or behavioral characteristic peculiar to an individual or group.
5. Catchy: Inviting them to play on, provided that they remain clear. Avoid rhetorical effects: word games, exclamatory punctuation, promotional language. Check if a sentence with a verb does not make the title more dynamic.
6. Should contain keywords: Search engines consider the content of titles to index web pages.
   Recycle these keywords in the text to strengthen the coherence of the message.
7. Have an autonomous meaning: The title is likely to be included search engine result page. Through a search engine, users can go directly on the page, they should be able to immediately understand what you are saying.
8. First words are most meaningful.
9. If a date is associated with the title, put it after the title.

 

Introductions

 

1. Limit the hook to a single paragraph, keep it short.
2. To highlight the hook, use bold font or a separate background color, but never use italics.
3. Summarize the essential information (just like this article, it is explicit here, but can be implicit or explicit both: for example, the beginning of a  tutorial.) The text subheader should be read as a “In brief” or equivalent. By itself, it constitutes the basis of the information. The rest of the article merely provides more details. To help summarize the information, use the technique of “5 W points” which leads to meet five basic questions that the reader wonders: Who? What? When? Where? Why?. In other words: Who is affected? what’s new, what is it about? when this has happened or when is this going to happen? where? Why? etc
4. On Target: Do not introduce a topic by a welcome by inconsistent or precautions. Apply the principle of “reverse pyramid” which means that we start with the basics, to go thence to detail and nuance.

 

The content of the articles

 

1. Cut out the information in several paragraphs.
2. Limit yourself to one idea per paragraph, make it appear in the first sentence.
3. Use, if necessary, several blocks of information. Deport the information, specialized or recurrent specialized in boxes (eg, key figures, interviews, sources, etc.).
4. Use headings and subheadings, especially in long texts (over 2000 characters).
5. Limit the word count and page length: Keep between 500 and 4000 characters if possible. If your comments require more length, consider the possibility of cutting the content into mini folders.
6. Put the keywords in bold. Without abuse.
7. Use bulleted or numbered paragraph or points, that gives a relief to the page.
8. Illustrate your content using visual information.
9. Use short sentences (15-20 words on average), vocabulary and style should be a simple, practical, straightforward and concise. That will help to read who uses translators like Google translator. Between two equivalent expressions, always choose the shortest. Use the active voice rather than passive. Replace contingent on two sentences. Avoid phrases accumulating numbers, acronyms, abbreviations or enumerations.
   Avoid interpolations, the phrases in brackets, the semicolon or a colon when used as a means of providing information or accessory respiration in a long sentence.
10. Avoid jargon (legal, administrative, commercial, etc.).
11. Avoid acronyms and other abbreviations those are not universal, unless having explicit from the beginning of the text.
12. Adjust your tone according to your target and maintain a consistent tone.
13. To ensure the sustainability of your content, use of absolute time markers (“May 2011” rather than “next month”).
14. Avoid spatial cues unique to paper or written text (“see further”, “below”, “above”, “next page”) or hierarchical (chapters such as Ia, or II.a ), b), c ),…). These markers are unrelated to the hypertext navigation.
    For similar reasons, do not use footnotes page. This bad habit is typically of Microsoft KB articles and never comes to Google’s top search result while searching for that similar problem, instead our or XYZ’s website comes.

Links

 

1. Limit the number of links in pages: The links in the body text should remain exceptional.
2. In general, group the links in the margin or bottom of articles, rather than integrating them into the body of the text (which is an incentive for the digression). See our layout.
3. While creating explicit links, give a clear idea about what they are. Avoid links such as “click here”, “next page”.
4. The links should be neither too short (which makes them somewhat less visible or explicit) or too long (which makes little scannable). Feel free to put the link to more words or phrase, but never on an entire paragraph. Hyperlinks composed of 3 to 8 words work perfectly.
5. Avoid redundant links that provide access to the same content.
6. Be sure to provide a connecting link of the title and the title of the destination page.
7. Through willingly link to a short text description to be more precise. Plugins can work for auto adding the tags in WordPress.
8. Make sure your hyperlinks are discriminating. Ties, especially adjacent areas must be clearly differentiated. For example, do not rub a link “New” and “News” link … or make them more explicit … “New on the site” and “Press Releases”.
9. Preferably use standard colors (blue for unvisited links and purple for visited links). In all cases, use different colors for visited and unvisited links.
10. Underline links: on hover or normally. Only acceptable exception: the links in the navigation interface, where the graphic design makes the interactive nature quite obvious.
11. Conversely, do not underline text those are not interactive.
12. Avoid that links open a new window (exceptions are large PDF files, computer applications other page explaining the text you have linked, other websites etc), at least for any content belonging to the same site.
13. Always include a link to the user that opens content other than a web page (PDF, Word document, etc.)..
14. Alternative arrangements in the case of hypertext links to images.

 

Images

 

1. Combine your images with an alternative text. This is a text equivalent, descriptive and concise overview on mouse hover.
2. Prefer informational images.
3. Whenever possible, plan a legend, concise and giving meaning to the image.