Producing for the Internet is different from producing for other channels, do you agree? To read a text on the screen of an electronic device, it is necessary to take some care to ensure the best possible readability and to ensure that SEO rules are applied efficiently.
It is therefore essential to establish some style and format standards so that all the content produced is organized in a similar manner.
With that in mind, we decided to structure our guidelines so that you can refer to them whenever you have questions about our models.
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Basic style
As we always insist on this, you already know the importance of scannability . But what does this mean in practice?
To do this, it is necessary to take into account some criteria:
1. Subtitles
One of the best practices to help your text have good scannability is to use subtitles to divide the content and to give Google the hierarchy of the information arranged. On the platform, you can use from “Heading 1” to “Heading 4”. This is called Heading tags .
H1 —the name given to “Heading 1”— should not be used in any hypothesis in the body of the text, as it refers only to the title of the content. The other variations —from H2 to H4— should be used to organize the sections of the text in a hierarchical manner. For example:
In addition, subtitles should be in accordance with the heading and lead guidelines, and should follow the same construction standard. For example:
2. Paragraphs
To ensure that your content does not have huge blocks of text that impair its readability, it is necessary to define the ideal size of the paragraphs .
Here at Rock Content, each paragraph must be between 4 and 6 lines —using the Rock Studio platform’s text editing box as a parameter— or between 50 and 60 words .
Also, when you finish a paragraph, you don’t need to include a space between them , i.e. you don’t need to “press enter” to pause. The automatic formatting of the Platform and the blogs already creates this space between paragraphs.
Another detail is that your text must be aligned to the left . It used to be standard to leave it justified, but over time we noticed that this format transformed the content into a large block that made it difficult to read.
Finally, it is essential to put great care into the introduction of the text, since it is responsible for contextualizing and capturing the reader’s attention. The standard is to always create introductions that have 2 to 4 paragraphs and that always end with an invitation to read the next sections of the text.
3. Format
Although we use bold and italics on Rock Content’s own blogs, this standard does not extend to our clients . As specifications vary from project to project, we do not make it a rule to highlight important terms in bold, or foreign words in italics.
4. Hyperlinks
One of the essential factors for good positioning business owner data on Google is link building , and for that, there is also a standard that we follow here at Rock Content. The ideal is to include around 3 hyperlinks every 500 words . This way, the text has a certain rhythm, even in that aspect.
To insert hyperlinks into your content, you need to follow these steps:
- Choose the word —or words—in which the link will be inserted.
- Select it(them) and click on the insert link tool , it is usually the one with the drawing of a chain.
- Paste the target URL into the toolbox and finish the process.
After this, it is good practice to test it by clicking on the hyperlink to see if the link was made correctly.
This is the proper way to include links in your content, i.e. full URLs in the body of the text or within parentheses are not the correct way to do this. Stay tuned!
5. Raya
One formatting detail that we use here at Rock Content is the use of the dash to insert additional information in a prominent manner , always using it at the beginning and end of the sentence you want to highlight. That is, if it is necessary to emphasize important information, it is best to use the dash (—) and not the hyphen (-).
- gentilic names of two peoples or territories when there is some opposition : Franco-Spanish army;
- adjectives where the first is masculine singular and the second agrees in gender and number with the corresponding noun : theoretical-practical lesson;
- capitalized words preceded by a prefix : pro-Angola;
- prefixes written separately : pre- and postoperative;
- time periods : 1987-2015.
To help you when producing text, there are keyboard shortcuts to insert them — but remember — they only work on the numeric keypad, okay?
In addition, it is interesting to memorize speeding up delivery: mastering ecommerce shipping speed (or at least write them down in a visible place) the main keyboard shortcuts that make this standardization automatically.
Lists
Another key element for the scannability of content is the organization of topics into lists . In case this is not relevant, you can organize it with bullet points.
This depends on the type of list chosen, i.e ebook content production. both numbered and bookmarked lists must follow these guidelines. For example:
- subtitles;
- paragraphs;
- format.
- Does format matter?
- The style of the intertitles is essential!
- The paragraphs, then, I need not say…
The use of lists is interesting in different situations. united states business directory One of them is when you have a series of short ideas to present, in which it is not worth dividing them into topics, since they would take up too much space throughout the text. Therefore, it is worth using them when dealing with different brief and objective information, which is not the main focus of the text, but which deserves emphasis and attention from the reader.
For example:
- standardization of terms : when words are (text continues);
- hyperlinking : technique used to make a connection (continues a short text).
In general, each point does not usually take up more than two lines of the article.