The eyes that read your blog belong to human beings. Whilst Google might be responsible for indexing your content without cosmetic bias, the engine driving your traffic forward is powered by flesh and blood.

You content not only needs to be high quality, it needs to look high quality. And that means that your content needs to be presented professionally, with professional fonts.

Fonts are a personal choice. But one thing is for sure, there are good fonts and bad fonts. And, unfortunately, bad fonts have a stranglehold on the web. Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be that way, you just have to know which fonts to specify first and which ones to kick to the back of the CSS queue.

Subconsciously, fonts have a huge influence on how your content works. Content penetration, the rate at which your content reaches it target and has the desired effect, is determined not only by your words but also by the way they look on screen.

Different operating systems, different font libraries and many other factors serve up a veritable minefield of issues for any blog designer. However, navigating this minefield isn’t difficult. It’s simply a case of serving up the best fonts first in your style sheet, enabling those users who have well stocked font libraries to put them to good use.

Font perfection is only a tiny CSS tweak away. Simply choose the style that you want and then copy and paste into your style sheet where applicable. I’ve labeled the font stacks Swiss, Humanist Sans, Oldstyle and Geometric Sans. If you have no idea what I’ve just said then just jump in, experiment and take your pick.

Swiss:
font-family: “Helvetica Neue”, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;

Humanist Sans:
font-family: “Gill Sans”, “Gill Sans MT”, “Gill Sans Std”, “Myriad Pro”, “Myriad Web”, “Myriad Std”, “Lucida Grande”, “Bitstream Vera Sans”, Verdana, sans-serif;

Oldstyle:
font-family: “Adobe Jenson Pro”, “Hoefler Text”, “Garamond Premier Pro”, “Stempel Garamond”, “Adobe Garamond Pro”, “Adobe Garamond”, Garamond, Georgia, serif;

Geometric Sans:
font-family: “Futura”, “Century Gothic, “Gill Sans”, “Gill Sans MT”, “Gill Sans Std”, sans-serif;

It’s all too easy to put distance between your readers and your content with bad typography. Good typography will encourage reader loyalty and generate repeat traffic. Your blog looks better and your traffic goes up.

Everyone wins.