TAG | content
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Writing for the web is different
3 Comments | Posted by Ken Munn in Copywriting, SEO, Search engines, Web Marketing
Take your pick
Pick a piece of online copywriting you like. Even some of mine! Cut and paste it into a new document. Then print and read it. Odds are you’ll find it doesn’t work as well in print as it does in pixels.
Is this harder to read?
Writing for the web is different, because reading a screen is different. It’s harder than reading paper, so work to make web copy less difficult to read. Tempt the visitor to keep going.
Yours sincerely
The web is informal – when did you last see a webpage beginning “To whom it may concern”? Use the first person and active constructions. Take liberties with grammar and construction, as long as you know what you can get away with.
Byte sized*
Break a chunk of copy into short paragraphs – it looks less daunting.
Ask a designer
Any designer will tell you about the advantages of white space. That works on-screen too.
Love spiders
Pepper web content with headlines and sub-heads. It leads the visitor on. And it’s an SEO technique for grabbing spiders.
Key words and phrases
Only humans read print. But web pages are read by stupid software. It doesn’t understand what you’re saying, it just indexes words and phrases. So, repeat key words and phrases more frequently than you’d do for a human reader. However, spiders aren’t going to spend money with you so, for the sake of the humans out there, learn to repeat key words and key phrases unobtrusively.
Pixels, not print
Always proof check for typos and grammaticals by reading your copy as a print out. You’ll see more mistakes that way. Then proof read for sense and readability on screen, because that’s where everybody else will read it.
Keep it short
Bored yet?
*deliberate mispelling. But you knew that anyway.
When it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO), content matters a lot. And not just what content you have, but how much. For example, I created this mini-site for 1st Financial Foundations. It’s purpose is to help people thinking about withdrawing tax free cash from their pension.
Initially, the site had 3 pages…
- Homepage
- About us
- Contact us
The content is optimised for the keyword ‘pension cash’. I created a sitemap, registered the site with my Google Webmaster Account, and waited to see where it would end up in Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages).
It ended up nowhere. It appears the competition for that keyword phrase is more organised than I realised. I started working on contextual and non-contextual backlinks, in an effort to get it somewhere in the first 10 pages. No joy.
It seems clear to me the problem is one of content. The site had only 3 pages, and one of those was a contact page. I’m now adding more pages in conjunction with the client. These additional pages focus on particular aspects of pensions (e.g. pension audit, types of pension, pension news).
Over time, I plan to build the site up to 12 pages.
Why over time? I want the pages to appear naturally, rather than all at once. I’ll also continue to build links back to the site. Based on results to date, I think it will be several weeks before the site appears on page one.
It just goes to show, it’s not only about quality. In search engine optimization quantity counts too.
This wedding site also has a content problem. It’s supposed to generate leads, and is highly focussed on wedding reception entertainment. The problem is two-fold…
- There’s no offer (lead generation requires an offer)
- The copy is client-centric
When writing copy designed to generate leads, the copy must be about the offer. Not about the company. It’s such a simple concept, yet it’s totally overlooked by almost every website out there.
