Lack of Paragraph Headings Can Lead to Bounce

Today I spent most of my time reading other blogs. Note to those of you that do not break your content up, and do not title paragraphs or chunks of material. I’m leaving your site right away. I’m sorry, I’m not going to spend the time to read your 500 word or longer post with just one title. It’s not how the web works.

This Is A Paragraph Heading

See the title above this paragraph? Can you tell what this paragraph is going to be about? I’m sorry, I don’t want to come of bashing this afternoon, but I simply saw soo, soo, soo many posts that had only one title. DUDE, or dudet, most people on the web skim for content, we don’t read. Well maybe a little. If you are one of these long poster people with one title, I’m not mad. I’m just letting you know you have to break up the content a little so we know what you are talking about quickly.

Some Basic Rules

Here are some basic rules when writing that super long post on your blog or website.

• Try to keep your sentences less than twenty words
• Limit your paragraphs to six or less sentences
• Make it easy to scan your text by using headings

Usability.gov released some statistics about this back in 2006 that said that only about 16% read an entire article. Jakob Nielson, a popular usability expert, recently released similar findings in 2009 that found that in a best case scenario only about 28% of a page is actually read at all. If your content is long, and doesn’t have have easy to scan titles or headings it’s a gonner, and will most likely not get read, not even parts of it.

Break It Up

So hopefully you get it now, and can see by example by simply looking at this post. Break the content up so visitors can see what is good to them.