Short answer blocks

What makes a block work

Self-containment is the whole requirement. The block has to survive being lifted away from its page, which means naming its subject rather than referring to it, and avoiding any word that points at a sentence somewhere else.

Length follows from that. Too short and it states a fact without the qualification that makes it true. Too long and it stops being a summary. Around fifty words tends to land in the right place for most subjects.

Tone should be flat and factual. This is the one part of a page where personality actively hurts, because a summary that reads as promotional is less likely to be repeated by a person or by an answer engine.

Where to put it

Immediately after the main heading, before any images, before any calls to action, and before the body of the page begins. It should be the first substantial text a reader encounters after the title.

Position matters more than most people expect because of how the opening of a page is sampled. Navigation, a breadcrumb trail and a hero section all consume the same early span, so a block pushed down can fall outside it.

We learned this on our own site. A block that looked correct in a browser was being cut short before the text began, and only a mechanical check revealed it. Our site check reports what is actually read.

Writing one from scratch

Start by writing the page title as a question, then answer that question out loud in one breath. Write down what you said. The spoken version is almost always closer to the right shape than a written first attempt.

Then tighten it. Replace every pronoun that points outside the block with the thing it names. Remove anything that is an example rather than part of the answer. Check that the first four words say what the subject is.

Finally read it in isolation, with the page hidden. If it raises a question it does not answer, it needs one more clause. If it answers a question the title did not ask, it needs cutting rather than adding.

A checklist for every block

This list is what we run through on our own pages. It takes about a minute per page once the habit is formed, and it catches the majority of blocks that would otherwise be unusable to anyone.

• Names its subject in the opening words
• Makes sense with the rest of the page deleted
• Contains no this, that or it pointing outside itself
• Runs to roughly fifty words rather than two hundred
• States a fact rather than a benefit
• Carries any qualification the fact needs to stay true
• Sits above images, buttons and body copy

How it relates to a meta description

They serve different readers and should not be the same text. A meta description is advertising for a result listing, written to earn a click, and search engines frequently rewrite it anyway.

An answer block is on the page and is meant to be read and reused as written. It can be more precise and less persuasive, because its job is to be correct rather than to be tempting.

Our page on meta descriptions covers the other half of that pair. Writing both from the same source sentence is fine. Publishing the identical sentence in both places is a wasted opportunity.

Marking it up

Plain markup is enough. A paragraph in the body, in the ordinary flow of the page, is read by everything. Elaborate containers add nothing and can occasionally get in the way of a parser that reads them narrowly.

If the page is genuinely a question and answer page, structured markup can state that relationship explicitly. Our page on schema markup covers which types are appropriate and which are commonly misused.

Do not hide the block from visitors and show it only to machines. Cloaked content of any shape is a policy problem, and a block worth quoting is a block worth showing to the person who came to read it.

Keeping blocks accurate

A summary ages faster than the page beneath it, because it states things flatly and without hedging. When a fact changes, the block is the first thing that becomes wrong and the last thing anyone remembers to edit.

Tie it to your review routine. Whenever a page is updated for any reason, reread the block before publishing. It takes seconds and it prevents the worst outcome here, which is a confident, quotable, incorrect sentence.

The page on content freshness covers the wider routine. A block is simply the place where staleness shows first and costs the most when nobody catches it.