The quality of your content is hugely important. With more content than ever before available with just a couple of clicks, your audience isn’t going to spend copious amounts of time and energy trying to figure out what you mean. Additionally, if others are supplying a higher quality of content, they’ll likely abandon your brand for others.

While quality absolutely matters, so does the readability of your content. Knowing exactly who comprises your audience and what kind of presentation is necessary ensures you’re making the content as user-friendly as possible. To help newer and smaller brands out, we’ve put together a few tips on ways to improve the overall readability of your posts and pages.

Keep the Sentences Short

Arguably the best way to improve the readability of any post or page is to shorten your sentences. Each sentence should be considered as its own point, fact or segment. The longer the sentences, the more your readers have to hang in there before getting to the next point or segment. By shortening sentences, you’ll avoid pinging noise at your audience, reduce bounce rates and ultimately improve the flow of the content.

Separate Your Thoughts

When everything runs together, it’s hard to keep track of what is being said. All too often, some people write in huge paragraphs, failing to realize that people are not capable of reading the content effectively in this format. Thinking back to primary school, you probably remember that paragraphs should be anywhere from 3-5 sentences: this is a generally good rule for online content as well. While it can depend on the length of the sentences and the exact topic(s) being discussed, break up your posts and pages more often to ensure better readability.

Minimize the Eloquence

While writing for a technical niche audience – or a highly educated one – may not present issues in terms of language, most blogs and websites need to keep language as simple as possible. If you can convey a sentiment, idea or subject with less complicated vocabulary, then your chances of keeping users’ attention spans focused is increased. This can help ensure that your content is read from start to finish. If people have to use a dictionary to determine what you’re talking about, then you’re probably hurting your overall efforts.

Throw In Multimedia

While we may think of the term “readability” as relating solely to written content, the fact is that content can be more easily digested when it incorporates non-written elements as well. Breaking up particularly long posts with infographics, images, videos or other relevant content can help reduce how much you have to write (if it is explanatory or helpful) and/or provide some breaks in between long bouts of words. Breaking up your content with different elements has a similar impact to breaking up longer paragraphs: it prevents monotony from setting in and helps stimulate your audience.

Nobody wants to create content for the sole purpose of pinging noise at audiences: your blog posts should be informative, engaging and readable. With these four simple tips, you can ensure that audiences will be more engaged with your content and read it from start to finish.