Writing Content for the Web
Writing for the web is much different than writing for other traditional forms of media. Here are a couple points to keep in mind while writing the content for your web site.
Content for the web should be written to keep users interested, and encourage them to navigate throughout your web site. You also want it to easy to navigate your site and don’t want to confuse them, or make them feel lost.
Body Text
Body text should be short, simple, and focused on the topic of the page. Having a long article is great as it provides an abundance of information to the user, however, don’t make your text too wordy as the user will lose interest and leave your site. The key is to find a happy point between too long and wordy, and too short and uninformative. Your user is on your site because they have questions about your company, product, or services. They won’t want longwinded answers to their questions if all they want is a simple answer. Our experience has shown that writing text in the first-person as if you’re talking directly to the user works the best. It has a more personable, and friendly appeal to it, rather than the typical corporate third-person verbage.
Properly Structured Headings
Headings are absolutely critical to writing content for the web. Often users are quickly browsing a site and don’t have the time to read everything word for word, or they’re looking specifically for something. Having clearly identified and structured headings will help your users find what they’re looking for quickly, and easily.
Lists
Incorporating lists is a great way to get users to notice your content. It also helps break up the page and stay away from the look of a long page of text, which can seem a bit boring at times. Providing a list of services, products, links, or whatever else it is you’re discussing on your page also helps the user find it as it will stand out from the rest of your content.
Bold, Italics and Underline
Use bolded, and italics to make certain keywords standout. Often users won’t read the entire length of text on web sites and will skim the page to look for certain keywords that pique their interest.
Absolutely never use underlined text on the web unless it is a link. It has almost become a standard that links will have underlined text, and if you’ve added underlined text to your site, but not made it a link, it can confuse readers, and they may think that you simply have a broken link on your site.
Internal Linking
Take advantage of the nature of HTML and the Internet. Ensure that you have multiple descriptive links within your actual content, rather than just in your navigation. This keeps users surfing around your site as they read the content, and makes their user experience much more natural. Once they’ve read a page on your site, they should have some clear direction to remain on your site and keep reading. If they’ve reached the bottom of your page and don’t have anywhere to go, they’ll most likely leave. By simply adding links into your content you can almost direct your traffic to specific pages, and ensure that they find the information that you want them to receive.
Search Engine Optimization
Following these tips has the added value of helping your web site with search engines. Having lots of content will make your site a bigger target for search engines as your site will match many more search terms, and may be seen as an authority to search engines. By properly structuring your content with headings, links, and lists it helps search engines identify the theme of your page, and understand where you belong in the web community.
Keywords
Make sure that you are placing the keywords and key phrases that you want to rank well for within your content. If you don’t mention your keywords in your content, then there is no reason for search engines to rank you for those terms. Although be careful, if you over do the use of your keywords it can be thought of as spam by the search engines and they’ll penalize you. The best practice is to target 1 or 2 keywords or key phrase variations per page, otherwise you won’t be focused enough to target those terms properly.
Build Your Site For Users
Throughout a number of articles on this site, I’ve talked about the benefits of creating an accessible web site to help your users, and the indirect benefit you can receive through search engines due to your accessibility efforts. Search engines are now advanced enough where the most effective way of marketing your site is to think of the user only. When you have built a great site for your user, you will have also created a great site for search engines.
