11/2/2009
4 Blog Typography Tips that Enhance SEO
What’s good for the human reader is good for the search engine reader. To demonstrate, here are four typography tips that improve readability and SEO.
- Bold Fonts. Used judiciously, bold fonts draw the reader’s eye to important text. Search engine spiders value bold text somewhat higher than plain text – so be sure to incorporate keyword phrases. Too much bold text, however, can backfire by overwhelming or confusing the reader.
- Italics. Search engines also like italic text, but here, you have to be more judicious still. Italic text is hard to read, especially on a computer monitor. Use too much and readers will skip over it entirely.
- H2 Tags and H3 Tags. These tags, valued by search engines, are used for subheads in blog posts and web pages. If you have been using bold fonts for your subheads, switch to H2 and H3 tags to generate more SEO juice. Always incorporate keywords in these tags. H2 and H3 tags should be formatted to be larger and more eye catching than regular bold text in order to draw readers in and inspire them to read further.
- ALT Text and Captions for Images. Images should always contain keyword optimized ALT Text. Again, you’re not only improving SEO, you’re helping out readers who cannot display images on screen, or who need a little descriptive information about what they’re looking at. Captions are also great for SEO and allow you to tell a story about the image – an excellent way to engage readers.
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5 Responses to 4 Blog Typography Tips that Enhance SEO
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Thanks for the tips Brad. I think this will help many people that are new to SEO and help them to develop there sites to incorporate such text. Of course, within blog posts, articles and Press Releases these tips also apply, so they are important to know for both on site and external SEO purposes.
Hi Jenny, It’s true that many or all of these techniques transfer to other media. I use PRWeb for press releases, and I can report that their formatting rules differ from what we’re used to on blogs. They don’t recommend italics or bold, and I don’t think they have any title tagging options. Interestingly, they also discourage bullet points – they say bullets are interpreted as spam.
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