You’ve got a great title, you’ve put subtitles in with h2 and h3 tags down your blog page, and you’ve scattered your keyword throughout your blog post to give your blog post great keyword density, now what? Well, good blogging doesn’t end there. You’ve also got to think about special effects.

I’m not talking about exploding automobiles, blood capsules that spew gunk upon command, and fabulous camera angles. We’ll leave that stuff for Bruce Willis and John Travolta movies. I’m talking about making your writing shine through visual effects of your writing upon the page. There are several ways you can enhance your blog through special effects. Here are a few:

• Add some images with alt tags
• Use ordered and unordered lists
• Bold and italicized text
• Block quotes with attribution links
• Anchor text within your blog post’s body

How Images Enhance Your Blog Content

If you’ve ever read a newspaper, you know how important it is to see photos on the page. Think of your blog as like an online newspaper. You may or may not be delivering important news, but there are different kinds of print periodicals. There are newspapers that specialize in features and entertainment, hard news, news specific to a geographic area, opinion and editorial, religious content, and so on. So, too, are there different kinds of blogs. All of them rely upon written text, but you can enhance your written content with graphics and images and I highly recommend that you do.

Images make your content easier to read. It breaks up the “gray” space, an old newspaper term that means long sections of text and nothing but text. There are different ways newspaper editors break up the text in newspapers and all of them can be used on a blog as well. Here are a few:

• Create a List
• Add a pull quote
• Use a photo
• Have an artist draw a cartoon and insert it somewhere in the text.
• Clip art
• Artsy fonts

I wouldn’t encourage the use of artsy fonts unless your blog caters to an artsy market. For most businesses, you want to stick to something readable. But enlarging the first letter of a paragraph, making it a different color, and changing its font draws attention to it so that readers are more inclined to read it.

Look at the list above. Most of the suggestions have to do with visual graphics, right? Photos, clip art, cartoons. Whichever you decide to use, you can enhance the content on your website by incorporating visual elements within the content of the blog. The CD and DVD Publishing blog didn’t do that in the particular blog post we have been discussing, but the writer of that blog could incorporate photos of CDs, DVDs, publishing equipment, people listening to music, or anything that might make the blog more interesting to the audience they are trying to reach. One blog that incorporate visual elements well is Zoe’s blog – check it out!

There’s just one problem with images. They aren’t crawlable. That is, the search engines won’t recognize them and they provide no SEO benefit. That’s why you should include an alt tag with every photo. The alt tag is a text description of your photo that the search engine will crawl in order to tell the search engine what your photo is about. Naturally, you’ll want to use your keyword. That will give you another instance of keyword use within your blog and increase your SEO mojo. The alt tag goes between the brackets of your img src tag and looks like this alt=”keyword descrption”. The alt tag of the screenshot of Zoe’s blog above is alt=”jewelry blog with image”. Easy, right?

Highlight Your Blog With Lists

There are two types of lists and both are easy to create on your blog: Ordered lists and unordered lists.

An ordered list is a numbered list, like this:

1. Numbered lists are easy to read
2. They start at one
3. End at the maximum number of items in your list
4. They make it easy for humans to read your blog post
5. Great for showing a list where the number of items is important – like a top 10 list!

An unordered list is a bulleted list. It looks like this:

• This is a list
• Bullet statements is all it takes
• Easy reading
• When the number of items in the list is not important

You can use a list to sell benefits, highlight features, discuss ways and means, or for any reason that you have a list of three or more items that your readers can scan. By giving your readers an opportunity to scan your blog post with a list, you save them time so that they don’t have to read every word in order to see if there is anything for them in your blog post. If they like what they read in your lists then they’ll read the entire post. And they’ll tell their friends about it so they can read it too.

Oh, and for SEO benefits, use keywords and links in your lists!

Be Bold And Italicize

While the author the CD and DVD Publisher blog may not have used the above elements well, but he did effectively use bold and italicized text quite well. But all of the bold and italicized parts of the blog post are in the second half. While they are used effectively, you want to create a balance in your blog post and include some of those elements at the top of the blog post as well.

For instance, this blogger could have started the blog post with a short two or three sentence keyword-rich introduction and bolded and italicized the paragraph for effect. Then, he could have followed that up with a list of benefits for anyone using CD presentations to impress the boss. After that, he could have used each bullet point in his list as a subtitle with a paragraph or two of content discussing the importance of each of those points. Whenever he wanted to highlight a specific benefit more than the rest or draw attention to a particular phrase he could simply bold and italicize that to draw attention to it. A good example of how effectively used this technique is in the below block quote:

(Source) Even if you do not get a raise from your boss, you now have something very valuable under your belt. By making these CD presentations, you can include this in your resume as extra skill and experience, and it will definitely impress other potential employers who will not find it hard to give you a higher salary than what you are making currently.

Speaking Of Block Quotes …

A block quote is the equivalent of a pull quote in newspaper jargon. You can use it to highlight a key phrase or idea or borrow text from another blog and comment on it. This is a very effective technique. It adds value to your blog through a visual element that also highlights an important piece of an important conversation. You simply take the words of someone else, emplace them within a block as above and then add your own comments, either agree with or disagree or parody them in some way. Whatever is appropriate to your blog and whatever position you wish to take with regard to the conversation, a block quote is very effective.

Notice also that I included the word Source in parentheses and linked it back to the source from which I took the quote. You always, always, always want to attribute your sources. For one thing, it’s polite. Secondly, it’s the right thing to do. And thirdly, if you don’t do it you may end up in legal hot water as the original source of the quote may think you are trying to steal their content. Give attribution with a link, but do it in such a way that you don’t encourage the link through. You really want people to stay on your blog, don’t you?

Anchor Text As A Special Effect

You likely know that anchor text is a keyword that is also a link. It is usually a high value element of any blog post in terms of SEO. It is especially of high value if you link to a page on your website that uses the same keyword because link relevance from a high PR site is an important criteria for search engines when they evaluate a blog or web page for ranking purposes. You definitely want to use anchor text.

But there are other benefits to using anchor text beyond merely employing it for SEO. Anchor text is also a great way to drive traffic to specific pages of your website that you want visitors to go to so that you can close them on a sale. And, because links do stand out on the page, there is a visual element to them that can make your blog post more or less aesthetically appealing, depending on how you use the links.

For instance, the CD and DVD Publisher blog uses anchor text in several places. But is it used effectively?

Obviously, these links will count for SEO purposes, but do they look good on the page? Can they be more effectively employed to drive traffic to the company’s website? These are questions you’ll have to ask as you build links from your blog posts to your website.

Are You Using Special Effects On Your Blog Effectively?

Blogging is not easy. It looks easy until you do it. But so many bloggers start a blog only to find out they can’t stick with it long term because there is so much to think about. Are you in this boat? If so, you might consider using a ghostwriter, someone who can write your company blog using all the SEO elements and special effects at their disposal to drive traffic to your website, improve your search engine performance, and close the sale.

Tomorrow we’ll discuss how you should close your blog posts. Do you have a blog post signature? You should.

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