Writing a list is one of the basic tools of the blogger. The search engine optimisation industry has noted the popularity of lists on most blogs and has taken heed. As a consequence, lists are seen as a good content fallback when you need to boost your readership.

The popularity of the list is a curious thing; one which the intelligent blogging community has been puzzled about. Bloggers have conducted their own studies of how popular lists are and have concluded time and again that a piece of content with a neat row of numbers down the side is almost guaranteed to keep your users on your pages.

The popularity of the list format lies within the realm of psychology. Lists work because they answer a number of basic needs, and cancel out some of the basic problems of online text. Let’s start with the problems first.

Problem 1

Text develops a pattern. Search engine optimisation companies usually recommend that you use different things within your text to help catch the reader’s eye. Changing font and applying bold, italics and hypertext are some of the methods you can employ, and you can talk to our consultants at SEO Consult about this aspect of optimisation. Sadly, do what you will, big chunks of text turn into a pattern over the length of a page. Like a busy wallpaper pattern, this eventually blurs into incomprehensibility.

Problem 2

Text is wearing on the eye. Reading on screen is more tiring to the human eye than reading a page in a book. Text is black spots on a screen of light.

Problem 3

Text doesn’t allow room to breathe. In Western culture, text is formed in horizontal lines reading left to right and top to bottom. There isn’t much white space around words, meaning that the eye is dragged ever-onward.

These problems are balanced by needs:

Need 1

The world needs to be understandable. A list usually breaks a difficult topic down into pieces that, taken one at a time, are easy to understand. Reading most of the step-by-step guides posted on the net, it’s easy to believe that anything can be rendered comprehensible with a list.

Need 2

The brain is attracted to order. Lists set everything straight, setting out information along a strict line. There is a part of every person that appreciates this reliable, predictable mode of distributing information.

Need 3

Novelty. Simply put, the internet is a novel world. As time goes by, the old sources of novelty become mundane, but the need for novelty continues. As most content on the net is text-based, setting out a list provides a little relief. It’s the same reason that video and audio content work so well.

Lists work because they address the needs and resolve the problems. The reason lists don’t form the basis of all internet content is because, as pointed out above, the novel swiftly becomes boring on the net. A smart site uses lists only once in a while, but the effect when this happens is often a very positive one.

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