Blogging has enabled every John, Dick and Mary (I’m a John by the way) to write his/her personal thoughts, ideas or ambitions. Depending on the quality of the material some blogs get more readers, while others are lost in the sea.
There are many ways to improve the traffic of your blog, but in the end it always comes down to quality content. But quality content implies only the body of the text; how it is formulated, expressed, written.
What most of us usually forget to take into consideration is, that the structure of the content is also a fundamental key of the content itself.

3 Sad facts about web-content and how to overcome them

1. Sad Fact:
web-readers don’t actually read your content (sorry, but it’s true), they scan it. Many eyetracking researches have been conducted and all of them conclude, that online people scan the text by following an F-pattern. This means headline and sidebar get the most attention on a site.
Solution:
Chunking. A chunk may be a small paragraph, a bulleted list, a graphic, anything that will act as a landmark.

2. Sad Fact:
you may think of it as text, but it’s really hypertext. This means, that your text is from definition non-linear. Readers may click a link in the middle of your text and stop reading it.
Solution:
Coherence; each chunk of your text should make sense on its own.

3. Sad Fact:
chunking may bring attention to the text itself, and not to its subject. Images, banners, ads are ignored by the readers. Actually, they do not only ignore the graphics, they ignore the content all together.
Solution:
Use graphics, boldface, capitals, etc sparingly. Choose wisely, which part of the text you want to emphasize. Don’t emphasize the whole body!

Start a Meme

Can you imagine the difference between web-structured text and print text?

My first post ever was about social representations. A more or less scientifical approach on the subject; absolutely impossible for web-content. Today I edited the post and made it more web-friendly (as far as it was possible). So if you want to see the difference check out my very first post.

The readability and consequently the traffic of your blog will increase drastically, if you just pay attention to the structure of your posts.
To test this, find an old post of yours, which you think it could improve. Do the improvements you think necessary, without deleting your original post and trackback to this post here. I’ll make a list of all the posts, which improved their readability.

Additional Resources on the subject

• the writings of usability guru Jakob Nielsen.

• Imnakoya brings some interesting observation on the subject.

• Writing for effective web pages is aa post with some insightful points. (although I disagree with a couple of them).

• I have also written a short essay on the subject, which you can download here (pdf).
• and a site to check the readability of your  content