Writing For The Web

Writing for The Web by Jane Thurnell-Read

Many practitioners now have web sites and need to write material specifically for it, but often they make some really simple mistakes. Hopefully once you’ve read this article, you won’t do that.

When you write for the web, you need to remember you are writing for two different audiences – your human site visitors and the search engine spiders/robots, who trawl the web deciding what each page is about. If you don’t get it right for your human visitors, then people won’t stay long on your web site or take the action (buying something, booking an appointment, etc.) that you wish. If you don’t get it right for the robots, you won’t get many people to visit your web site in the first place.

Teasing Titles Don’t Work
The title of the article is really important. In traditional journalism titles/headlines are often designed to tease, outrage or intrigue the reader, so the reader reads on. But web titles serve a completely different purpose. They serve to tell the search engines what the page is about. And, crucially, the search engines aren’t people – they’re computers. So titles need to be clear with the words that sum up what the page is about in the title. So don’t have headlines such as  ‘Take Your Time – Let Us Help You’ as the search engine won’t know what the page is about. Be explicit, so don’t use ‘Information On Our Therapies’ – you need to list the therapies.

The Beginning Is Really Important
The traditional way of writing is to write an introduction, but the search engines give extra weight to words in the first few sentences in deciding what the page is about. When the search engines trawl the web, they take more notice of words and information that is higher up, so put the important stuff first. Don’t do a fun or leisurely introduction. Ask yourself what words people who would be interested in this article will use as search terms to find it. Use these words in the first paragraph.

In addition remember that the search engines present their results with a couple of lines summarising what the page is about. These words are often taken from the first part of the page, so they need to be words that will grab people’s attention. I learnt this information the hard way. I put a legal disclaimer at the beginning of each of the pages in the symptoms section of Health & Goodness. The search engines used this as a summary of what was on the page! This didn’t exactly inspire people to click on the link and visit my site. We’ve now moved the legal disclaimer to the bottom of these pages.

Images
People stay longer on a page if it has images, particularly images of people, so illustrate your pages with images. Use images of people smiling too rather than people looking sad and unhappy. Your visitors are likely to stay longer on the page. You can get some great images here.

What is Your Page About?
You may think it’s obvious, but sometimes people make some really basic mistakes. I have some friends who own a restaurant. I took a look at the home page of their web site for them. It looked beautiful – very minimalist and with beautiful images. It spoke ‘class’, but I used a tool that in a sense replicates what the search engine robots see and came up with a completely different analysis. This free SEO web tool counts the number of occurrences of each word on the page in question. When I ran this tool for my friends, the word ‘restaurant’ didn’t appear at all! I ran the tool for one of their rivals and they had over 30 instances of the word ‘restaurant’ on the home page. So, when the robots get to my friends’ home page it probably doesn’t realise that it is looking at a site about a restaurant! This means that they are getting far fewer visitors than they could, so somehow they need to balance the needs of the search engine robots and at the same time express the elegance and ambience of their restauran.t Interestingly, having done this for them, I ran the web tool on the Health & Goodness home page, feeling pretty confident that it would be fine, but I saw that I could improve my home page too. You can do this for any page just by putting the correct URL in. . Check out your own site and see what the search engines see.

Copyright 2008 Jane Thurnell-Read