[tweetmeme]Every day I receive an email with motivational quote from HeartMath and I’ve saved many of them because they resonated at a particular time in my life.  Last week, I received this one and it seemed totally appropriate for bloggers, so let me share it with you:

“Simplicity, clarity, singleness:  these are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy.”

—– Richard Halloway

As I originally wrote for The Bloggers’ Bulletin, these are the attributes that bloggers strive for in their writing.  I know that I do.  Sometimes I find myself including too much information in a post.  And I especially think that trying to stuff a post with key words so the search engines can find you can ruin a post – from the readers’ perspective.

This applies to large businesses, too, that have the resources to research the information needs of their customers.   Maybe the words customers use are not the words the company is using in its advertising and promotional materials — and this includes blogs.  What is great about blogging by companies is that they can generate immediate feedback from customers, if you hit their hot buttons — or key words.

Whether you are writing for yourself or your employer, ask yourself these questions:  Are the key words really relevant to your content?  Are you writing for your readers with simplicity and clarity?    Are you articulating one key idea in the post that is easy for the readers to understand?  Is the idea likely to stir comments from readers?

It’s easy to get discouraged when a brilliantly written blog (in your view) falls flat with readers.  Let’s all keep at it with a will to getting better and enthusiasm for our ideas.  I will leave you with another quote that I hope will make your blogging a happy and productive experience.

“Begin growing from where you are – not from where others think you ought to be by now.”

—— Steven Douglas Lawrence

Related posts:

1. Get the Most out of Guest Blogs with Some Practical Guidelines
2. Wow. Website Grader Gives My Blog a Top Ranking
3. Why I’ve Come to Love Blogging

I’m not exactly sure how I came upon the study done by Jakob Nielsen about how people read web content.  The study claims eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.  This could be helpful information in enhancing SEO rankings for your website or blog.

This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components, according to Nielsen:

• Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F’s top bar.
• Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F’s lower bar.
• Finally, users scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F’s stem.

Implications of the F Pattern

Quoting from Nielsen’s Alert Box, the F pattern’s implications for web design are clear and show the importance of following the guidelines for writing for the Web instead of repurposing print content:

• Users won’t read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. Exhaustive reading is rare, especially when prospective customers are conducting their initial research to compile a shortlist of vendors. Yes, some people will read more, but most won’t.

• The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. There’s some hope that users will actually read this material, though they’ll probably read more of the first paragraph than the second.

• Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behavior. They’ll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.

You can learn more about the F Pattern theory and see actual heatmaps from user eyetracking studies at http://bit.ly/18Zl1I and decide for yourself if you want to follow Nielsen’s advice.

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