There are 2 books on my bookshelf that I regularly thumb through for ideas and inspiration, the first is Claude C Hopkins’s Scientific Advertising and the second is David Ogilvy’s Ogilvy on Advertising. There is always one page that I keep returning to in the latter which offers advice on how to use typography correctly. It starts off by saying that “Good typography helps people read your copy, while bad typography prevents them from doing so.”
When writing long copy, he makes a 10-point list of some “typographical devices which can increase readership.
1. A subhead of two lines, between your headline and your body copy, heightens the reader’s appetite for the feast to come.
2. If you start your body copy with a drop-initial, you increase readership by an average of 13%.
3. Limit your opening paragraph to a maximum of 11 words.
4. After two or three inches of copy, insert a cross-head, and thereafter throughout. Cross-heads keep the reader marching forward. Make some of them interrogative, to excite curiosity in the next run of copy.
5. When I was a boy, it was common practice to square up paragraphs. It is now known that widows – short lines – increase readership.
6. Set key paragraphs in bold face or italic.
7. Help the reader into your paragraphs with arrowheads, bullets, asterisks and marginal marks.
8. If you have a lot of unrelated facts to recite, don’t use cumbersome connectives. Simply number them – as I’m doing here.
9. What size type should you use? [He says that 14 point is too big but 11 point is just right]
10. If you use leading (line-spacing) between paragraphs, you increase readership by an average of 12 per cent.”
(Taken from Ogilvy on Advertising, Prion Books)
Obviously, the Internet was not around in the way we know it when the book was written, however, I still believe that most, if not all, of them have some relevance today for search engine marketing. If only more search engine marketers paid more attention to what has already been tried and tested over decades of testing.
And by the way, if you haven’t already you must buy this book. Ogilvy on Advertising (from Amazon.com)
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