Content and Optimizationby: Gene DeFazzio
|
Website Content Guidelines
Writing content for the web varies greatly from writing for a newspaper or magazine. The following guidelines are geared to the Internet and the visitors who will be reading your website content. Also, these tips for good text layout and structure will enhance your chances of being indexed by the search engines and aid in optimizing your website.
Use shorter sentences, words and paragraphs than you would use when writing for print.
Develop one idea in each paragraph of your copy. Don't try to cover more than one subject in a paragraph. Focus each paragraph on one topic or idea.
|
|
Create compact and brief text. Try to write your content in half the number of words you would use normally for a printed document.
Use simple words and phrases to make reading easy.
Incorporate numbered or bulleted lists when appropriate.
Highlight important text (e.g. make it bold, colored or use hyperlinks) to make it easy to scan.
Employ descriptive and brief headlines and subheadings. This will help to optimize your webpage content for the search engine spiders.
|
User Friendly Content
People read one quarter more slowly on the web than when they read printed material. Computer screens tire the eyes quickly and visitors tend to scan text more than they would items in printed documents. This is the reason that your paragraphs should be short and concise. Use half the words that you would normally use when composing printed text.
Content Scanability
Write and layout your content in an easy to scan format. Think of how you read a webpage and you will understand the importance of using scanability elements in your work. Use bold or colored headers and lead-ins for blocks of text so that the main points stick out like a sore thumb. The Web is not a place to be subtle. Scanability elements like these are picked up by search engine spiders and help your efforts at optimizing your website.
Content Presentation
People who surf the Web are usually short on patience. They want to find the information they are seeking quickly and without wading through a mass of text. Obscure and complicated text is not viewed favorably by the average website visitor or search engine spiders. Keep you text in blocks that can be scanned easily. Use white space to isolate these blocks of information from adjoining copy.
Visitors will leave your website if they can't find what they are looking for quickly. You must attract their attention and maintain their interest if you want to have a successful Internet presence. You will have about 10 seconds to grab a visitors interest and a little less than a minute to maintain that interest. Avoid the pitfalls associated with your own self interests and give your readers what they want. Optimize your content for your visitors.
Content Layout
This list covers the important aspects of content layout:
-
Put the most important information at the top of your webpage. Make it simple to comprehend and avoid boring, hard to digest dialogues.
-
Try to combat reader fatigue by using an easy to read font size and style.
- Present each idea in an easy to absorb bite-size chunk. Use short sentences, short paragraphs and present only one idea per paragraph. Avoid information overload.
-
Write meaningful headlines and subheadings. Cute or promotional lines in your text mean that your visitors will have more to read and will find it harder to understand your content.
|
Check out the webmasters article archive.
Copyright© 1999 - 2008