Better Readability for Improving the Number of Site Viewers - Readability Rules Continued

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Long Lines and Paragraphs

Reading on the web is very different from reading on paper. Even if the monitor is good, reading on-screen is much more tiresome than reading on paper. As a consequence of that, readers loses concentration more quickly. So the form in which a piece of text is presented is very important.

For instance, long lines and long paragraphs are killers for web content. Lines more than 80 characters are extremely difficult to read, especially if the paragraphs are long. It is a basic rule that users do not read on the web, they scan the text. If the line is long, or worse, needs horizontal scrolling, it is a good bet that this page will be skipped by the user.

Due to the same reasons, long paragraphs are also a bad choice. Keeping the paragraphs short, or using bullets (which is a preferred layout) makes it more difficult to use keywords intensively without repeating them too often, while still keeping the text meaningful. This fact does pose a difficulty to search engine optimization.

But it is different with the page title and the headings. Both for search engine optimization and for readability, use more headings (especially keyword-rich). A descriptive page title is always better. Well, just do not go to extremes, like having a heading for every other paragraph.

While horizontal scrolling is absolutely unacceptable, vertical scrolling is more tolerable. But if the text is too long and readers need to scroll down several screens, you will want to make it more readable. You can obviously accomplish this by dividing it into pages. More pages is good not only for readability, but for search optimization and ad-generating page turns.

Hyperlinks

After you have divided longer texts into separate pages, hyperlink them. Besides that you have more pages with content, you will have more sitewide hyperlinks, which again is good both for readability and for search optimization.

For longer articles, you may want to include a "Print" link, which will allow people to see and print the whole text on one screen without page breaks. But be careful! For search engines, the "Print" link might look like duplicate content, which is one of the deadly sins in SEO. Therefore, to avoid trouble, add a line in the robots.txt file that tells search engines not to index the directory where the print version of the pages is.

While more hyperlinks are better for SEO, for readability there is an upper limit over which the text becomes more difficult to follow (especially for users who have the habit of clicking on all links that catch their eye). The position of hyperlinks matters for readability. If you disperse hyperlinks all over the page, for search engines this is fine, but it is very confusing for your readers.

User-friendly URLs that are easy to remember are more important for readability, although search engines also do not like dynamically generated pages with cryptic URLs.

Images

Images are for pictures, which is a trivial but obviously often forgotten principle. When you have some special text, that needs either a fancy font or special treatment which web languages cannot provide, the first that comes to one's mind is to turn it into a picture. But this is bad both for search engines and for readability.

If you do not provide a meaningful description in the <alt> tag, the existence of the image will simply be ignored, and in any case, only the text in the <alt> tag, rather than the whole text in the image, will be indexed.

As far as readability is concerned, using images for text is also bad, because generally fonts look smudged when converted into text and are therefore more difficult to read on-screen. Also, text in images does not scale, so if your visitors choose to use a screen resolution different from the one you made the site for, images will not scale together with the rest of the text.

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