Writing Web Content

Writing quality web content is a craft. I tell website owners that readers have the “Burger King syndrome” – they want it (content) their way right away. When it comes to website content, you need to deliver the “goods” quickly, succinctly, and in a winning way.

Short and sweet is best and so is get to the point, but don’t get too carried away keeping your content short especially on the home page. You’ve got to have enough content to build a great keyword density on your top performing words to get traction in the organic search results.

The web is scanning medium. You should write for the web differently than you do for the print medium. Make sure to use headings and sub headings to break up your content. Make sure to use bullets, lists, and tables to direct the user to other pages or sections. Use anchor text to deep link keywords on products or services to help search engines travel deep into your inside web content.

I don’t recommend bolding keywords or phrases as this may encourage readers not to read your page content at all, but Yahoo and MSN do more heavily weight bolded words in their organic algorithm and you may be an extra boost on those engines if your top keywords or phrases are bolded. Google used to do the same, but does not take into account bolded words at this time. Not all websites are candidates for using bolding as a technique for organic placement it may impact the appearance and readability of the page.

Keeping your font size small also encourages reading versus scanning of your content page. But don’t work to defeat usability by keeping your reader from being able to increase the size of the font using tools and text size with their browser. It is best to have your font be set in percentages. My favorite for a typical size is 85% which is about 10 pixels or 10 pts.

The best home page for a website gives an overview of services and products and deep links in the content to important web sections. Ideally it should be more than 300 words long and less than 800 words long.