Read This Article  Before Putting Anything Else on the Internet! - Page 4 of 4

By J.S. McDougall

5. Does this pass the scan test?

As I said above, a website—and unfortunately most digital content—is not read. It is scanned. People will pass their eyes over your content to see if they can find the interesting or valuable tidbits. It is important that you give them plenty of visual tidbits to find. Don't bury your value.

Use bulleted lists. Use blockquote call-outs. Use section headers. Use bold. Use photos. Make sure the default image for any of your videos is interesting. If your content is a block of visually impenetrable text, readers won't stick around to slog through it. And, now that Google is incorporating site usage data into their rankings, it's important to minimize the number of times people come to your site and then bounce right back to Google. Google has always known when that happens. And now they're using that "time spent on site" data to rank you. BB

J.S. McDougall is the author of "#tweetsmart: 25 Twitter Projects to Help You Build Your Audience" (O'Reilly, 2012) and "Content Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Making Your Content a Valuable Marketing Tool" (O'Reilly, 2012). He is a digital strategy consultant to the book publishing industry and can be reached on Twitter at @jsmcdougall or through his company's website at catalystwebworks.com.