How To Write For Your Website

Learning how to write for your website will take time and effort, but is very important if you want to increase your traffic and search engine rankings. Writing original content will help you achieve more exposure in the search engines, who reward sites that publish unique articles. Having high-quality content will improve your site and also improve your business.

Whatever your niche there is huge competition online and you are in a battle to attract readers to your site. To add to the challenge of getting readers, people’s attention spans have also diminished, so you must quickly give them the information they are looking for.

Does your content have clean formatting? Is it error-free? Is it neat and conversational? Is it appealing to the audience? These are just some of the questions you should ask yourself when you are writing for your website.

You probably created your website to sell a product or service or sign up new members. When a visitor lands on your site there is probably something you would like them to do and if they leave your site without taking action it’s a lost opportunity.

What is important is getting your visitors to stay long enough on your site to take the desired action. In this post, I will give you some ideas to get the information to your visitors quickly and encourage them to engage with your website so they stick around longer.

Tips For Writing Quality Content

Keyword research

You want an article to achieve a good ranking then it’s vital to do your keyword research before starting. Remember it’s much better to be on the 1st page of Google for a keyword with 50 clicks per month, than on the 3rd or 4th page for a keyword with 5000 clicks per month. Why? Because most people don’t pass the first page of results.

To achieve these first page rankings you should focus on low competition keywords, they generally have less traffic but are much easier to rank on the first page of the search engines. These keywords will normally be long-tail keywords or phrases which are a lot more specific. When a visitor uses one of these search phrases, they know exactly what they are looking for and you will receive more relevant traffic than for more general keywords.

If you follow this course of action you will get first page rankings for many posts and your traffic will increase. Check out this post about keyword research.

Engage Your Audience

You might have seen the word engagement on the internet, but don’t really know what it means. Getting people to your site may be your ultimate goal, but what these people do once they are on your site is perhaps more important. Ideally, they will engage in some way or complete an action. All websites have an objective: to get you to buy something, to sign up for a newsletter or just to keep you reading.

These tips may help you engage your readers:

• Getting your audience engaged starts with your web content, have an interesting introduction, tell a story or leave your audience with a question to make them think.
• Write in a conversational tone to encourage your audience to enter into a conversation or some kind of interaction with you.
• Focus on things that will interest your readers, not on how good you, the product or the service you are promoting is. You will obviously want to promote your product or service somewhere in your post but when you do, do it in a way that shows how it will help your audience.
• Add a call to action, make it clear to your readers what you want them to do.

Create Original Content

Duplicating or copying another website’s content won’t lead to good rankings in Google which means less traffic. Creating original content will draw and keep visitors and goes a long way to achieving better search engine rankings.

Write For Your Visitors Not the Search Engines

Your articles should be written with your visitor in mind, using keywords naturally. Don’t stuff your articles with keywords in the hope of better rankings, this will have the adverse effect. If you’re not sure where to include keywords this post about on page SEO will help.

Write Attention Grabbing Headlines

Do you know that 80% of people read the headlines while only 20% actually read the whole web content?

Create a headline that will catch your audience’s attention and entice them to read your content. Remember, your headlines are what your visitors read first and they play a significant role in influencing your audience to read the whole post.

A tool that might help you improve your headlines is this headline analyzer.

Avoid Using the Passive Voice

People searching for things on the internet usually want quick answers and by using the active voice you will use fewer words. The active voice will help you to keep people’s attention and be more persuasive while the passive voice will make your content seem dull.

For example:

• Jim ate ten sardines for dinner. (active voice)
• At dinner, ten sardines were eaten by Jim. (passive voice)
• I will cut the grass every week. (active voice)
• The grass will be cut be me every week. (passive voice)

Using the active voice will make your readers take notice of what you write and make your content easier to understand.

This trick that might help you identify passive voice, it doesn’t work every time, but is useful or this article from wikiHow explains how to avoid passive voice.

Link To Other Content

Back up your articles and information by linking to other contents. The more content you link to, the more substantial and trusted your article will be. Plus, by doing this, you help the search engines figure out what your content and website is about.

Carefully choose who you link to. Link to authoritative sites such as Wikipedia where possible.

Interlinking to other posts on your website is also very good practice, this gives your visitors other reading options by linking to other relevant posts. This may also reduce your bounce rate which can only be beneficial.

Add Images and Videos To Your Content

By adding images and videos, this will provide a better user experience. Remember that people absorb information in different ways. Some people like to read, some by looking at photos, while others prefer videos. Illustrate your point and enhance the reading experience by using diagrams, pictures or videos. Only add photos or videos that are relevant to the content.

There are many sites that provided free photos or embed videos from YouTube.

Keep Your Content Short Yet Informative

People want to get information as fast and organized as possible. They want a content that is easy to read. If a reader sees lengthy and difficult text they will move on to more lively websites. Keep the interest of your audience alive.

Writing For A Website Is Different!

Visitors to your website are not like someone who would read a book. When you go to a website what do you do? If you’re like most people you scan the page, you look at the headlines and assess if the page will give you the information you are looking for. You make a quick decision and then either read the page or click away to find another site.

Therefore, you must make sure your visitors can find your most important information quickly.

• Make your text easy to understand, don’t use words that are too complicated or fancy
• Your posts should be easy to read with short paragraphs and sentences
• Address your visitors directly use the word you and avoid repetition or unnecessary words
• Use subheaders H2, H3 and H4 tags to make your content easier to scan
• Use bulleted or numbered lists
• Use bold and italics to emphasize certain words. This again is useful when people scan your page they will be attracted to these words.
• Use the blockquote button great to highlight an important point (should be used very sparingly)

Blockquotes are a great way to highlight an important point in your post.

Proofread Your Content

You can do this by yourself but it would be a good idea to ask someone to review your content or use a spell checker to correct the punctuations, grammar and spellings. The spell checkers will correct some of the basic errors but are not the ultimate solution.

Reading aloud can also help you to improve the flow of your content and eliminate mistakes not picked up by the spell checkers.

Final Thoughts

Building a website is the first step in creating an online business but is not enough to guarantee your success. By following the tips in this post you will enable people to find your site via the search engines and also encourage them to return to your website.

Content that is helpful and relevant has a good chance of attracting visitors and once they are on your site you want to keep them there long enough for them to take the desired action – making a purchase, subscribing to a service or subscribing to a newsletter.

People will only convert after a good user experience, good content is part of this experience but having a site that is hard to navigate or slow to load will drive people away. So you can see that writing great content for your site is just a part of the puzzle.

You will learn more tips and techniques as you write more articles. Remember, the best way to learn is through failures and practice makes perfect.

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If you have any other tips on writing for a website that people would find useful let me know in the comments section below.

Thanks for reading,
Peter