Use Subheadings to Make Your Posts More Readable

This post was borne out of frustration on my part. Often, when I'm reading through ActiveRain posts I see what I think is misleading use of bold text. I'm talking about when people bold the first sentence of each and every paragraph. Perhaps they think it makes the appearance of their post more interesting when they do this, but I think all it does it clutter up the page.

Instead of using bold text to artificially make your post look "better," why don't you try using subheadings instead? You can make your post look cleaner, more organized, and easier to understand too.

 

Subheadings Can Help Your Readers Understand

Endless lines of text without any break are hard for readers to digest. To make your blog post easier on the eyes and more interesting too, you should add items that stand out on the page like images, bullet points and subheadings.

But adding subheadings will not only break up monotonous lines of text, if you do it right, subheadings will help readers understand what points you are trying to make.  

Hopefully your post is not just a rambling stream of consiousness sort of based upon a loosely defined idea. Make sure when you are writing that you have clearly defined in your own mind what the two or three most important points are, then make sure they are obvious. Feature them. Highllight them not just by bolding them, but by making them larger and making them stand alone. Make them subheadings (more on how to do this in a moment). 

Think of it this way: many readers don't read your entire post at first, they scan through it to see if it's something that captures their interest. When they scan they look at the prominent items on the page like the title, subtitles and images. If they are intrigued by the topic then they may go back and read more carefully. But if they can't understand what your post is about at a glance, or if they feel intimidated by the endless lines of unbroken text, your potential readers may navigate away.  

 

Creating Subtitles and Other HTML Tweaks Are Easier Than Ever

Now that ActiveRain has added the new HTML button on the toolbar, making a subtitle stand out is easier than ever. Here's how you can do it in four easy steps.

1. Create your topic sentence
2. Click on the HTML button on the toolbar
3. Find the sentence you want to highlight and replace the <p> and </p> tags with <h2> and </h2>
4. Hit update and return to your post in WYSIWYG, you'll see your subtitles are now not only bolded, but they are larger too which helps emphasize them too.

 

The Better Your Readers Understand, the Better the Search Engines Understand Too

Although I do read about SEO every day, I don't claim to be an SEO expert by any stretch of the imagination. And although I've read about the importance of h2 tags in past, I can't say for sure if using h2 tags is still a valid SEO strategy that should be used to help your posts be found online. But I do believe this without any doubt: if you write and organize your posts making sure your points are really clear (and subheadings should help this), you will do better with readers and I bet, you'll do better with search engines too.

 

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