12 Crucial Points to Remember When Writing Website Content
Writing web content can be a difficult task. Whether you’re writing for your company’s blog or designing a website, there are certain guidelines that should be followed in order to improve readability and engage your audience. Many of the rules we’ll cover here apply mainly to online writing tasks, but they can also help when it comes time to polish up offline content, such as a press release.
Written content for a website is a useful tool to keep a business’ services and products fresh in the minds of customers. It is an inexpensive way to market, without being intrusive. Many businesses have trouble writing the content themselves, so they usually hire content writers for websites. Here are 12 key points that content writers must understand before starting their tasks:
Make sure your website content is well-written and error-free
Google has become notoriously famous for its “robot” updates that go through websites and report broken links or poor grammar. An important part of making sure your website’s content ranks well is to make certain it’s error-free; this means checking for broken links, spelling mistakes, and grammar issues.
Use keywords and phrases to help improve your website’s ranking on search engines
When writing web content, it’s important that you optimize your article in order to rank well when someone searches for related topics. Keywords and phrases will help search engines understand what your content’s about, and you may even consider using keywords in the title as well as certain places on the page.
Keep your website content up-to-date and relevant to your target audience
If you’re writing web content that will be linked to from various locations around the web (such as blog posts), it’s important to write in a way that will encourage your readers to share your content with others. This might mean adding interesting statistics about the topic or using words and phrases that are popular in social media.
Tell a story or share personal experiences to engage readers
Another great way of engaging your website’s audience is by writing in a way that’s more personal and informal. This might mean telling stories, sharing personal anecdotes, or inserting your own thoughts and feelings about the topic as you discuss it.
Use images, infographics, and videos to break up text and add visual interest
The human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text; this means that including images, infographics, charts, and other visual elements into your website content will help keep readers engaged. These elements are especially important if you’re writing long-form articles or whitepapers.
Format your website content for easy readability
It’s also important to format your website content in a way that’s easy on the eyes. This means avoiding all-caps, huge blocks of text, and other layout issues that will make it more difficult for readers to skim your content. Make sure fonts are big enough to read and use a color scheme that stands out but is easy on the eyes.
Know your content’s purpose
Before any content is written, content writers must understand the overarching purpose of their content. Are they trying to get more leads? Are they trying to build a relationship with users? Or are they simply trying to inform users? Content writing for websites should be done in line with this content’s goal.
Research your content
By researching content, content writers can achieve a greater level of detail and accuracy. If content writers are writing content on coal mining, it is important that they know what coal mining entails. The more content writers know about the content before writing it, the better off they are!
Be honest with yourself
Content writers should be aware of their content’s limitations. Content writers should be realistic about content and try to figure out ways around unavoidable obstacles.
Always proofread content written for websites
Spelling errors and grammatical mistakes are everywhere, content writers included! It is crucial that content writers proofread their content as much as possible before submitting it to clients.
Write content using the active voice
Writing content using the active voice will give content a more direct and concise feel. It focuses attention quickly on the subject, rather than dragging it out over many words and phrases. Using the active voice also makes content appear much simpler and easier to read.
Be aware of sales content
Content writers should be aware that content for a website does not have to be sales content. In fact, content writing for websites about products or services is often more useful when it also contains non-sales content. Content can include information about how a product works, what users think about service, and so on. This content will help build a relationship with content consumers and will help content writers be seen as a valuable resource.
Whew! That was a long list of guidelines, but they’re all important pieces of writing web content. Hopefully, this article has given you some new ideas on how to write your next blog post or website copy.