Content is king

There are more than 900 million websites in existence, more than 3.5 billion Google searches every day and roughly 350,000 tweets sent every minute. It’s a tall order to compete in that space so it’s important to capture readers’ interests as quickly as possible. Some studies claim that 55 percent of visitors spend 15 seconds or fewer on a webpage.

Good website writing is the key to getting noticed. Follow these principles to ensure your website content gets the attention it deserves.

Know your audience

It may sound simple, but so many writers begin writing before thinking about who it is they’re trying to reach. Before crafting your content, ask yourself who your audience is and how you can influence them.

Write short, simple sentences

Long sentences may be great in a novel, but for online content, sentences should be 25 words or fewer. Focus on using nouns and verbs and only sparingly use adverbs and adjectives.

Maintain an active voice

Use active rather than passive verbs, and specify the subject of the sentence. Active voice helps create concise, reader-friendly sentences.

Use multimedia

Sometimes a picture or other media is literally worth a thousand words. Research shows that a full 90 percent of the information transmitted to the brain is visual. People process visual information 60,000 times faster than text. An easy-to-read chart or graph can do a better job of explaining a complex topic than text alone. Images help break up text, making your page easier to read.

Make text skimmable

In addition to putting the most important information up top, make sure text is easy to skim since most web readers will scan the page to find the specific piece of information they’re looking for; and if they don’t find it easily, they’ll move on.

• Instead of text-heavy paragraphs, use bulleted or numerical lists. Instead of one long page of text, organize content into labeled tabs.
• Always include “white space.” This is the empty space that surrounds paragraphs, images, and other elements on your web page. Comfortable amounts of white space around text make it more legible, and more enjoyable to read.
• It’s also important to divide content into sections with descriptive sub-headers. For example, a webpage about dogs could consider the following headings:
  • Dog breeds
  • Dog health
  • Dog nutrition
  • Dog attire
  • Learn More

These sub-headers not only help readers navigate the page, but they will also help search engines find your content.

Search engine friendly

Readers find web content through many different paths—social media sharing, links from other websites, email sharing, and search engine results. Search engine results are especially important for web writers. The text could be well-written and informative, however, if it’s not optimized for search engines, it will be difficult for people to find.

Call to Action

Good webpages include a call to action – a link to a video, a phone number to call, a contact form to complete, another post to read. This strategy helps direct readers to other areas of your website and encourages them to share your content with friends and family.

Keep these calls-to-action short and concise, and include action words like download, share, join, sign up, learn more, contact us, or watch. Boxes and buttons add more visual appeal.