Intro
Before detailing 12 tips on formatting the perfect blog post, Steve hates on virtue signalling “Trojan Horse” social media posts and loves on using Google Chrome’s Inspector as a great way to learn about CSS and HTML.

Zero Authority Toolbox: Google Chrome Inspector
Google’s Chrome Inspector is a pretty awesome tool for checking out your site’s (or any other site’s) HTML, CSS, Javascript, and more.  Simply right-click, select “Inspect” and a window will open up below the front end showing you the backend HTML.
Hover your cursor over any HTML element (and click the little sideways arrows to see the HTML elements nested inside) and the window on the right will show you what CSS style rules govern that element’s style.

Steve’s Peeves: Virtue Signalling “Trojan Horse” Social Media Posts
This isn’t blog-related necessarily, but every now and then, Steve will see a Facebook where it’s pretty obvious the intent of the post was to deliver the subtext. And it’s freaking irritating.
Examples

* I sure hope the lady I saw this morning is OK.  I pulled her out of a burning car before EMS arrived.
* Arrrrgghhh!  I hate procrastinating!  It makes it tough to train for my Ironman.
* I love having fast hotel wifi.  The Four Seasons and Ritz Carlton have great uptime especially.

12 Tips for Formatting the Perfect Blog Post
This list isn’t all encompassing, but Dave and Steve detail a few tips to keep your blog posts formatted correctly to keep the reader on page.

* Keep your paragraphs short, 3 sentences max!
* White space is your friend.  A buttload of text scrunched into a small space will drive away readers.
* An accepted rule of thumb is to make sure you have an image every 250 words or so, but make sure you don’t add them for the hell of it.  Make sure they’re relevant to your topic as well.
* Use a clean sans serif font like Open Sans, Futura, or Avenir.  Times New Roman is so 1998.
* Never use script font in the body.  Never.  Except maybe if…..nope.  Never.
* Never use a richly-colored background. White, off white, light gray. Steve likes white or off-white when he uses PNG files with transparent backgrounds.  It flows really nicely.
* Use size 14 font at a minimum.  Steve discussed “measure,” or the number of characters in a line of text.  65 characters is considered the ideal measure for web content.  Anything greater than 85 will fatigue the reader more quickly.
* Never insert a full web address as a link.  Use anchor text instead.
* Make good use of your headers to make your content scannable and signal intent. Also make the header a different font, not just a bolder, larger version of the font you use in your body.
* Use bulleted lists, again, to make your content more scannable.
* Be careful putting text over an image.  Use a mask or a transparency layer over the image to help create contrast with your text.
* Concentrate meaning and keep sentences short by removing unnecessary words.  (This is more writing than formatting, but doing this feeds very readable formatting.

Steve recommends reading Brian Dean’s posts over at SEO site Backlinko to see how kickass formatting is done.  His posts are fun to read and formatted to read quickly, even though his posts are normally freaking huge 

People and Products Mentioned

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