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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:
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!
@softwebchicago Good technique -> ask questions in subheadings and answer them in the body #myblogguest
— Ann Smarty (@seosmarty) May 2, 2013
- 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)
@figmentations I prefer more descriptive sub-headings for usability reasons but intriguing works well too 😀 #MyBlogGuest
— William Patton (@Will_Patton_88) May 2, 2013
- 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)
#myblogguest @seosmarty I prefer my Subheadings to be pithy and informative so the reader know what's next. #myblogguest
— Robert E Kraus (@RoberteKraus) May 2, 2013
There’s really no reason why you would not want to use subheadings (and some of our authors are surprisingly apposed to that!)
@softwebchicago Like Don said, title and subheadings serve different purposes: so you can play with both #myblogguest
— Ann Smarty (@seosmarty) May 2, 2013
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)
More than just bold then. RT @Roadturn SEO … make sure to set subheadings out in <h3> or <h2> #myblogguest
— Helen Hoefele (@figmentations) May 2, 2013
Additional reading: How to Write Exquisite Subheads at @copyblogger and Web copywriting 101: Sub-headings by @portent
So as of now the conclusion on subheading as per me, it has to be compelling, enticing, eye-catching and ask Questions! #myblogguest
— Softweb Solutions (@softwebchicago) May 2, 2013
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.
Joseph
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