The phrase “content is king” rings loudly across the internet.  For the most part it is certainly true because if your content is compelling (and people actually view it) you can quickly develop raving fans across the globe.  But, the best content in the world can be hurt by poor presentation. 

Remember in school when you had to to a term paper?  If you felt your paper was only average you might take the time to purchase a better binder to put it, make sure the cover page looked excellent, and maybe even throw in some extra charts that looked stunning just to give your paper that edge to get the “A”.  None of those aspects really changed the content, but you were hoping that your eye catching presentation might catch the professor off guard enough to give you a little more than the paper was worth of.

Putting some great lipstick on your blog posts and web pages can certainly have the same effect.  A good presentation can bring average content to life, while it can make stellar content soar to the highest of levels bringing you a flood of traffic and customers.

Maximizing the layout on each and every post and page takes a little bit more time, but hey they are going to be online working for you day in and day out so it is worth a bit more effort.  Here are some ways we can make sure our content stands out.

Pictures with Punch

Ahh, the blatantly obvious yet often forgotten.  Pictures need to enhance the content.  When you look at the picture it should draw you into the content and make you want to keep reading.  There are plenty of affordable sites to get images from so invest a small amount of money to get images that will really dress up your page. 

When you are talking about neighborhoods that you operate in on a daily basis, just get out your digital camera and take some killer pictures.  Take more than you need and develop a library of pictures so you can use fresh pictures year round. 

Blockquotes That Zing

Blockquotes can really bring pages to life.  You can use a blockquote to make actual quotes stand out on your page or just highlight important pieces of information like magazines do.

Try using 1 blockquote per page and see how your pages come to life

If you are doing your own CSS work, then you certainly can go extreme and get some cool formatting.  It takes just a little bit of time to set up some good styles one time and then you can use them throughout your site.  If you want some creative and easy examples, check out CSS Newbie’s post on 6 Ways to Style Blockquotes for inspiration.

Heading Tags

The heading tags are naturally designed to draw attention, but often they are overlooked beyond the first H1 tag.  Using heading tags correctly allow a reader to jump from key item to key item naturally.  It also gives you a bit of a bump with your real estate SEO efforts so it’s worth some attention.  You can only use one H1 tag per page so make it a statement with it and place it at the top of your page.

Don’t just stop at using the H1 tag though, use the H2 and H3 tags to organize your page into different sections.  Since each one is a different size you can easily differentiate more important content from the rest.  Try to make sure your Call to Action is in an H2 tag so it isn’t overlooked.

Take the time on each and every page to make sure it stands out and stands alone.  The extra time it takes is well worth while as you will watch your conversion rate soar.  If you already have a bunch of pages and posts online go through each of them and spice them up to see some immediate improvements.

To your success.

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