‘Writing web content’

How to write web copy to suit search engines and readers – Part 2: Organising your copy

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011 | View on own page?

In part 1, I looked at key phrase research and how to arrive at a selection relevant to your pages. Now it’s time to tackle your page copy and then, as we’ll see in part 3, integrate your phrases.

The look and feel of your website is not just about its design and navigation. The visual appeal of your copy – how it looks on the page – is just as important.

This is because of the way web visitors read online. They scan read looking for signposts that will point them where they want to be. So arranging your copy to make it more attractive and easy to read helps your visitors find their way around. Think in terms of page headlines, concise paragraphs and short sentences.

Now consider the information you want to present. Put yourself in your readers’ position – what is it they’re looking for from your products and services? Write so they can find out what they need, and not to tell them what you want them to know about your business.

Use a personal tone of voice that directly speaks to your visitors. So keep it simple – your visitors will be looking for familiar words and phrases relevant to their search for information. Adopt the first person (I, us, me and we) to address ‘you’ and set aside any marketing-speak or sales jargon. Resist any compulsion to shoe-horn content from printed materials into your site.

Start with a page headline
Keep to one topic per page and start by writing a relevant, primary headline (the one at the top) of around eight words or less. This is the first content your visitors will read. Support this with secondary headers, or subheads, to break up the copy and signpost specific information. Your readers will quickly be able to see where they are and will be less likely to get lost.

Remember scan readers are impatient people; they don’t want to plough through dense explanations or wordy justifications. In their case, less is definitely more so keep sentences punchy and short – no more than, say, 20 words. Organise them into similarly concise paragraphs of two or three sentences, four at the most (remember that visual look).

Writing effectively on your website is all about communicating and driving actions. So write simply, get to the point quickly and stick to it.

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How to write web content to suit search engines and readers – Part 1: Selecting key phrases

Thursday, February 25th, 2010 | View on own page?

To be truly effective, your web content should address two audiences – the search engines and your site visitors. Let’s begin by looking at how to satisfy the first of these here.

Start by planning a web page for each of your services or products. The search engines decide the relevance of a page to a search query by rating the key phrases in your content, so the first task is to research these for each page of your site and then integrate them seamlessly into your copy (more on this next time).

Note we’re talking key phrases here, not single keywords which are far too general and will produce an unmanageable number of search results. In the new Moving Finger site, for example, I’m likely to have a specific page on my newsletter writing services for which a targeted key phrase might be ‘business newsletter copywriting’ (rather than just ‘newsletters’). Not only does this describe a particular aspect of my business making it relevant to the search engines, it’s also one that is likely to be used by searchers to produce a more highly targeted number of prospects.

You can select the most relevant key phrases for each of your pages with research tools such as Wordtracker or Google’s free keyword tool. Alternatively use the services of a search engine optimisation (SEO) expert. Test drive further options by conducting searches using your own key phrases and by asking customers what words they would choose to look for your services. Check out your competitors’ sites as well. You’ll be able to see the key phrases they use in each page’s title tag as well as those featured in the individual page content.

Check competitiveness

The next step is to check the competitiveness of the top ranking key phrases you’ve identified. I’ve found this best left to an SEO specialist but you can also do this yourself using analysis software such as WebCEO.

In basic terms, the competitiveness of any given key phrase is based on the number of pages held in a search engine’s database which have been optimised for that phrase – the more there are, the harder it will be for your page to be ranked for that phrase.

Nevertheless if you’ve researched your potential key phrases well you should be able to identify plenty of relevant alternatives for which the competition is weaker, and which mirror those used by your potential customers.

Focus on these and you will give yourself a realistic chance of achieving decent search engine rankings.

Coming up in part 2: Making your copy readable

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Could internet plagiarism damage your online reputation?

Saturday, December 5th, 2009 | View on own page?

Internet plagiarism continues to be a concern for schools and universities anxious to stamp out the wilful passing off by their students of online content as their own. But it’s also becoming a problem for business, too. Now you might think that having your expert content used by other sites is the greatest form of flattery and, anyway, it all helps to get the message out there.

But you’re likely to feel decidedly less relaxed if the content you’ve laboured over so meticulously has not only been lifted without acknowledgement, but has also resulted in your site being downgraded by the search engines. Search engines don’t like finding the same content on numerous web sites and consider it spamming, so plagiarism could prove damaging to both sites’ standings. Furthermore, there’s the possibility of damage to your own reputation as you could be mistakenly seen as the plagiarist by those who don’t know otherwise.

You can check the integrity of your site content by searching on some key phrases in Google, or by using the free Copyscape plagiarism checker which also has guidelines on how to go about tackling any breaches. Another useful resource is the Internet Archive Wayback Machine which holds digital references of your site’s previous versions to help date and prove that any disputed copy is, in fact, yours.

I was able to find original pages from the first Moving Finger site going back to 2003.

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