Writing for your website or blog can be a daunting task, below we go over some key points to help make your content easy to read, digest and rank better in the search engines.
1: Put the most important content first
Known as the inverted pyramid, this method of writing puts your conclusions or most important/interesting information first at the top of the page. Who, when, where, why, what, and how should be addressed in the first paragraph. This lets the user get an over view of the page, if it’s a topic they are interested in they will read further.
2: Research your keywords
You don’t need to just get visitors to your site you need to make sure you are getting the right kind of visitors, visitors who are actually interested in the things you do or sell. Therefore, making sure your content is relevant and contains relevant keywords is essential. So, you need to know what people will type into a search engine when looking for the market you are in or product and services you sell or provide.
Ask yourself what you would type into a search engine if searching for your website. The keyword needs to be relevant to what you do or sell.
Then see which websites already rank for your keywords, do this by simply typing your keyword into Google. If these are your competitors or offer similar services to yourself, you know you are on the right track. This also gives you an idea of how much competition there is for these keywords. Take a minute to look at the adverts that appear for this search terms, these are shown at the top and bottom of a page and have the Ad symbol next to them, this will also give you an idea of how competitive it is.
The excellent people over at Moz (https://moz.com) have a great starter guide to SEO and this page in particular looks at keyword research: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research
3: Who actually reads a web page? Writing for page scanners
The truth is most people don’t read a web page they scan it as Steve Krug writer of Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability said:
[What most web visitors do] is glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they’re looking for.
To ensure you get the information across to scanners make sure you do the following:
- Make sure your headline says what you are about.
- Sub headings should summarize your key points.
- Put emphasis on other key points such as quotes and bold text by making them stand out.
- Ensure links are easily distinguishable and have relevant text.
- Numbered lists and bullet points help break up text and summarise key points.
4: Humans over google bots
You should always write for the human reader first producing well written engaging text. Your keywords should fit naturally into the text, about 3-4 times within the main body text. Make sure your keywords appear in the title and they can be added to image ALT tags too. You may also wish to add in an SEO plugin to make sure you Meta Tags and Titles are well optimised for your keywords.
Key word stuffing is an absolute no. Firstly it’s no fun to read and secondly Google knows about this and may penalise you for it.
5: Break up the content
When writing for the web you should break your text up into easily manageable chunks of text. You need to make your text as easy to read as possible. Using short paragraphs and sentences will help achieve this. Try and stick to four sentences maximum in your paragraphs and 12 words per sentence.
Adding images and graphics will also help break up your content, pictures also help convey the general subject matter of the content and can help illustrate certain points. Remember to add relevant ALT text to your images, which can include keywords.
6: Spelling and grammar
A spelling mistake or typo can undo all the hard work you’ve done and make you look unprofessional in a second. If you’re not sure about grammatical points such as where to put an apostrophe, when to use a colon or semi colon or if a word has a hyphen in it look it up, it’s so easy to Google, many desktop publishing programmes have a spell check, grammatical hints and help sections and there is always our old (and somewhat dusty) friends dictionary and thesaurus at hand to help.
Once you’ve finished writing walk away and leave it, come back to it later with a fresh pair of eyes and read it again, you may spot mistakes you’ve missed. If possible, get someone else to read it over for you too.
7: Use simple words, don’t try and be clever
A cucumber may be an elongated salad legume, but everyone knows what a cucumber is, so call it a cucumber! You might think buzzwords and jargon make you sound clever, but they have the opposite effect. They often make you sound pretentious and can even make the sentence unreadable or change the meaning of your sentence. You’ll fast lose the interest of your reader or even worse alienate them.
8: Avoid the passive voice
The passive voice is when the subject receives the verbs action. Take a look at the next two sentences:
The dog ate my homework. ~ Active Voice
My homework was eaten by the dog. ~ Passive Voice
Which one is more engaging? The first I here you say, that is because the second is written in the passive voice. The active voice, which the first sentence is written in, is when the subject does the verbs action, in the case above the dog(subject) ate(verb). The active voice is also more concise which is a must for writing on the web.
Choosing your verbs carefully can also make you text more engaging for example with the above sentence I could easily make it more exciting if I changed the verb to destroyed.
The dog destroyed my homework.
9: Editing your content
You should always try and get someone else to read over your work. Let them know the point of the piece and who they are writing it for. Once they read it ask them some key questions which should test to see if they have understood what you were trying to convey. If they get it right great, if not you may need to revisit parts of your writing.
A fresh set of eyes will also be helpful in spotting typos, spelling mistakes and grammatical errors as mentioned earlier.
If you don’t have anyone to read it through, go away and come back to your work after a period of time.
10: Revisit your content
The wonderful thing about the web is that you can revisit your content and change it over time. You can add content, update details and revisit your keywords. You can also make sure that your links are up to date.
