Tips for Writing for the Web Part 2

Welcome to Part 2 of our two-part series on better writing for the Web. In this era of gnat-sized online attention spans, this series gives you techniques for grabbing readers by the lapels and convincing them to grab right back. Click here for Part 1.

One of the most important things to understand is that Web writing and writing for the printed page are two distinctly separate beasts.

In print, people read from paper. It can be held in lots of comfortable positions, there’s little glare to speak of (unless it’s on glossy stock) and people are a bit more forgiving of long-winded authors.

Compare that to the Web, where people will view your writing through an electronic screen. Screens, even small ones, are unwieldy from a reading standpoint. The glare they produce and radiation energy they beam out cause fatigue to the eyeballs. Given people’s generally impatient state of mind when they’re staring at a screen, they’re ruthless when it comes to clicking something else if they find your content laborious to get through.

That doesn’t bode well if you have a Web site through which you’re trying to serve visitors with a product or service. This two-part series is all about how to give your site a leg up over your less-enlightened competitors (and there are many out there).

Here go a few more pointers on how best to take advantage of the online medium with the written word:

1. Use, don’t abuse keywords. How do you get found by search engines, anyway? One thing they look for is keywords. These are simply words or phrases that people commonly look for when researching a particular topic. You can “salt” your page with the most looked-for keywords for your topic, as well as put them in the hidden “meta” tags of your Web page’s HTML coding. And you definitely want to include key keywords in the title and URL of the page. If any of this doesn’t make sense to you, mention it to the person who handles your Web design or maintenance. He or she will know what to do.

Just be careful not to go overboard with keywords. The search engines have gotten very sophisticated and can sniff out techniques deemed to be gaming the system, such as “keyword stuffing.” They penalize Web sites that overuse keywords by dropping them down in rank. To get a complete grasp of how this works, it’s worth your time to pick up a book or two on Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

2. Know your purpose. What about writing style? That’ll depend on whom you’re targeting as your audience (you do have a specific audience in mind, don’t you?) and the overall purpose of the site. If your site is a one-page sales letter, you obviously want to dial up the promotional and marketing aspects of your copy. If it’s a business or an ad-supported site, you’ll want the content to skew heavily toward being more educational in nature (example: www.digitaldeltamedia.com).

3. Watch your tone. To get even more detailed about the point above, make sure the tone, or “voice” of your copy is more or less consistent across your site. By “tone” we’re talking word choice, sentence structure, emotional tenor and so forth. Is it humorous (adolescent male magazine)? Conservative (mutual fund company)? Empathetic (funeral home site)? Authoritative (Wiki or how-to site)? Using the right tone bolsters the site’s brand and credibility. Using the wrong tone confuses your audience and sends them packing – that is, clicking – for somewhere else. So pay special attention to this one.

You might even want to draft some guidelines for yourself and anyone else writing for your site. Those guidelines, perhaps part of a larger style guide, should spell out the writing tone along with specifics on the site’s purpose and who it is meant to serve.

That wraps up this two-parter on writing for the Web. Use these techniques, along with some of the other tips mentioned in this space on writing articles and developing content, and your digital empire will expand to the far reaches of cyberspace before you know it!