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As you might know, we’ve been requiring subheadings (as well as images) since day 1 on MyBlogGuest.

Someone may criticize us for enforcing these quality standards on users but we’ve been always good at doing what we’ve believed in.

With the introduction of the new higher quality level – Elite Guest Articles – we can’t stress the necessity of well-structured content enough…

So first let’s try to understand why we need subheadings in the first place:

The Necessity

An image is worth a thousands of words:

Subheadings

We’ve talked about subheadings during our April hangout on Google Plus; here are some takeaways:

  • User interaction: Most web readers are busy; if they see the plain chunk of text and have hard time quickly understand what it is about, they will just leave
  • Subheadings enhance the quality of web content giving it structure. They thus increase the odds your guest article will be accepted by the publisher!

  • Subheadings are good for SEO as search engines use them to determine the relevancy of content
  • Subheadings are good for usability and accessibility (most screen readers extract them from the web page)

  • Subheadings make it easier for you to structure your thoughts (very often I’d write subheadings prior to the body to line out what I am planning to say)

There’s really no reason why you would not want to use subheadings (and some of our authors are surprisingly apposed to that!)

The Art

While it all depends on your creativity and the way you organize your thoughts, here are some good ideas of making subheadings useful and enticing:

  • Subheadings, ideally, should tell the story even when extracted from the page: They need to be meaningful takeaways from the article
  • Subheadings need to be short and catchy

The Format:

No ALL IN CAPS please – once the publisher wants to change it, he/she will have to retype every single word. So please stick to either title case or simple sentence format.

Whether it’s h2 or h3 tag will depend on the publishing blog theme (some themes use H2 tags for post titles). Read more about h-tags here: Using Page Headings Correctly (that article is old but it still stands true)

Additional reading: How to Write Exquisite Subheads at @copyblogger and Web copywriting 101: Sub-headings by @portent

Other ways to structure your content and increase its quality are:

  • Bullet and numbered lists
  • Images

Next week we’ll announce the winners of our guest blogging plugin contest as well as talk about building relationships with bloggers.

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Joseph

Founder at MyBlogGuest
Ann Smarty is the founder of MyBlogGuest. Feel free to contact her if you have any questions about the platform.

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