Create “eye rest stops” in your blog posts

Do you want to increase the chance that your blog posts will be read?

Then be sure to remember that research shows that readers on the web don’t read word for word. They scan content for keywords. Web usability pioneer Jakob Nielsen documents this finding in his research.

Nielsen wrote in 1997 that:

People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. He found, in his research, that 79 percent of his test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent ready word-by-word.

His suggestion to content providers is to use scannable text. He points to using highlighted keywords, meaningful subheadings, bulleted lists, one idea per paragraph, using the inverted pyramid style of writing and half the word count or less than in conventional writing.

In a blog post, a couple of days ago, Iowa blog coach Mike Sansone suggests that bloggers create “eye rest stops.” He says readers scan a post so quickly that they need some kind of device to give their eyes a quick rest.

He suggests using one or more in each post. He suggests using images placed on the right side of the post because readers move their eyes from left to right.

Other suggestions include bold facing well-chosen sections of text, using hyperlinks and using lists, either numbered or bulleted.

Keep your paragraphs short. What you learned about writing paragraphs in grade school doesn’t work on the web. Think of the user and whether they will be slowed down to much with long lines of content and no eye rest stops.

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