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A Guide to Writing High Quality Long-Form Articles with WordPress

A Guide to Writing High Quality Long-Form Articles with WordPress

October 17th, 2018

Here is a guide to writing high quality long-form articles with WordPress.

Long-Form Articles with WordPress

Putting out some in-depth content is a great way to distinguish yourself from other content creators. Long-form articles allow you to do a deep-dive into a topic and provide your readers with some serious value. When it comes to WordPress, long-form means at least one thousand words, and often much longer. Here are some tips for writing high quality long-form articles with WordPress.

Have a table of contents

Including a table of contents is a good way to get people interested in your content. Think of it as a sneak preview at what you’re going to be delving into in your article. It should cover all your main points, so basically it’s a list of your subheadings. Readers love a good table of contents; they allow people to jump right into a topic if they feel like it. That’s a much better situation than someone getting bored with your initial paragraph and clicking away before they could get to the part that will interest them.

Break things down

Divide your long-form article into some sub-headings. Breaking your content down into more manageable, easily digestible sections will encourage people to read on. Online readers look at a giant block of text and, more often than not, don’t get very far. They are also good for your post’s SEO. You should aim to make your subheadings as descriptive as you can, people like to know what they’re about to read. If you have an especially long section, then that is the perfect place for a subheading.

Good visuals matter

Including some good quality visuals can be beneficial in several ways. For one thing, they are good at breaking up blocks of text, and making the article more approachable. They also add a lot of value for instructional purposes. A picture is worth a thousand words. Even if you’ve written a well thought out and detailed set of instructions, an image or two can still be very helpful to your reader. Your image should be directly related to the text near to it. But it’s important to be careful when including images. You’ve got to optimize them, or they can really slow down your page’s loading time. And that’s very bad for your traffic. There are lots of good plugins available that can help with this, including Imagify, ShortPixel, and Optimus.

Choose a nice theme

Make your article stand out by choosing a good theme. There are a ton of themes available to choose from, but it’s best to use themes that were created specifically for long-form articles. Give Typologya try, it’s versatile and allows you to choose between a layout with featured images, and one without. It’s also got a scroll-over effect, which is perfect for keeping the reader focused on your writing. If you’re looking for a clean, minimalist kind of look, then look into Typable. It’s very easy to customize, does a great job on the white space, and features a very slick drop-down navigation menu.

Check your grammar and proofread

To create high quality content you need to make sure your writing is proofread and grammatically correct. A few errors or simple typos can take away from an otherwise good piece of writing. Luckily you don’t have to do it alone, there are plenty of tools available.

Conclusion

Most people think that shorter is better when it comes to writing online articles, but that is not always the case. There are already a ton of short articles on just about every topic. If you want to make yourself stand out then why not do a deep-dive into a subject, and leave the reader informed, and also interested in what else you have to say.