Ben Cotton

Good suggestions, Jono. For long blog posts, they not necessarily bad. What I like to do with long posts is to give general idea in the first paragraph or two and then go back and build on it later in the post. That way if people bail out before they bottom, they still get the takeaway I want.

Depending on the type of post you're writing, that may be easier or more difficult. If it's a more marketing-ish post (e.g. here's how my cool project is going to make your life a little more fun) then you can hit the marketing points in the open and then dive into the technical details for people who are interested. If it's a straight how-to, then that's a little harder. The approach there is to explain what the how-to covers and _why_ (the why is so often overlooked), then dive in.

As a technological matter, I'm pretty happy with the Yoast SEO plugin for Wordpress, which grades posts on their readability and SEO optimization. It will even highlight sentences that are too long, use passive voice, etc.