Styling Articles with HTML will Increase Traffic and Boost Conversions

Adding styles and logical structure will increase the readability of your article. Properly implemented HTML styling of your articles will make it more digestible and effective. Well styled articles performed better that poorly styled articles or article with no styles.

The objective of styling articles is to capture and maintain the attention of your readers. You must be careful when styling your articles. Too many HTML styles can detract from your article and frustrate your readers.

Styling articles requires a minimum knowledge of HTML web markup language. You can insert HTML tags to style your article.

HTML is comprised of tags which allow you to manipulate the style and layout of text in your articles. I will not discuss HTML any further because there are plenty of HTML tutorials on the web.

There are 3 primary ways to use styles in your article.

1. Highlight a term or phrase
2. Organize and simplify the layout
3. Give meaning to the text

Highlighting

Highlighting a term or phrase within your article can add emphasis to an idea in your article. Bold and italics are commonly used to emphasize text in your article.

Organizing

Organization will help readers easily digest and consume your article. It’s best to organize your article into short chunks of text. This can be accomplished with sub-headline, short paragraphs, lists, and tables. Bold and title case are used to create sub-headlines. Short paragraphs can be created with line breaks.

Lists are created with the ordered lists and the unordered list tags. Ordered lists are numbered lists and unordered lists are bulleted lists.

Tables and charts (text based) can be formatted with the ‘pre’ HTML tag. Unlike all other HTML tags, the ‘pre’ tag allows lines only to be wrapped at the linebreaks in the source and spaces will not be collapsed. This will allow you to keep the manual formatting of tables.

Meaning

Semantic meaning can be assigned to specified text within articles. Blockquotes are used to signify that a portion of text is a quote. The blockquote HTML tag will also indent a paragraph.

HTML Tags

<b>Bold</b>

<i>Italics</i>

<pre>Pre</pre>

<blockquote>BlockQuote</blockquote>

<ol>Ordered List</ol>

<ul>Unordered List</ul>

Some Final Tips

• One of the most prevalent errors made when adding HTML styling to articles is forgetting to close tags. All open tags must have its corresponding close tag. Make sure that all HTML tags are inserted correctly.
• Don't use excessive line breaks when creating articles. Remove any excess line breaks within and at the end of the article.
• Keep the length of paragraphs to 3 sentences to prevent large blocks of unreadable text.
• Avoid using ALL CAPS, large blocks of italics, and special characters because it makes your article more difficult to read and consume.
• Avoid using hard breaks in the middle of sentences to change the layout of an article. But you can use hard breaks for recipes, lists, and poetry.