There are many lists out there that provide you with tips and tricks for things to take care of when you start writing content for the web. Yet, these recommendations are mostly listed randomly. Here we put the core principles into useful order, so that you can streamline your work and get coherent results fast.
This article introduces you to a process of six steps to get your web writing going:
1) Define your keyword or key phrase
2) Research: get to know your audience
3) Ideate: let your thoughts (and love) flow
4) Structure: start building
5) Refine: write to be read
6) Go meta: accessibility, metadata and SEO
Step 1 — The key to all things further: keywords and phrases
When writing for the web, you are writing for two groups of readers: people and machines.
It doesn’t matter if you are writing a blog, product copy, or any other type of content you produce: choosing a center keyword or keyphrase for your text first will be extremely benefitial. It provides you with a starting point for writing for both of your audiences from the beginning.
While your human audience expects to be informed and entertained by what they find after landing on your page, the search engines must take them there beforehand. To do so, they need to capture your page’s content and its relevance to the search they have been commanded to make.
Don’t worry: You don’t need to take a class in Search Engine Optimization to be able to understand and make use of keywords. The Content Marketing Institute provides a handy list of free online tools for keyword research that you can use, and this video gives you the principle idea about how to work with keywords.
For this article, I used the keywords (and -phrases), “web writing” and “how to write for the web” and ran them through a couple of the above mentioned free tools. I then picked the most useful keyword ideas to use in my text: copy, content, article, blog, online, copywriting, tips, tricks
Step 2 — Research: get to know your audience
Gather information on your potential readers: Make a list with the groups of people that you want to adress: peers, clients, future customers, or other readers that you expect to benefit from your piece.
It is crucial to understand who you are writing for.
So find out and think about:
- what is it your audience is looking for
- what information they need
- what are their pains
- how do they expect to be helped
- what is their background and
- what “language” do they speak: what tone and voice are they used to
Step 3 — Ideate: Let your thoughts (and love) flow
Now is the time to sit down and just write.
Jot down the ideas you have, in sentences, phrases, words. Use your pool of keywords from the previous step. While doing this keep in mind what you learned about your readers and try to connect with them. Imagine you are the reader of your text: what would you like to find and how would you like to be approached?
Be generous and really share something of value with your audience. Just throwing together a couple of facts to decorate your sales-pitch will not work: todays’ customers will smell you out.
Here is a valuable quote from David Amerland’s SEO Help: 20 Semantic Search Optimization Steps That Will Help Your Business Grow:
“Be unique and show who you are, what you do and how you do it. Be clear on what you want.”
This way you will earn people’s trust and attention.
Step 4 — Structure: start building
Now as a pile of material and lovely ideas has materialized, it’s time for building!
Research shows that todays’ online readers partly read and partly scan through articles. To cater to that behavior — and to keep them interested throughout your piece — stick to the following rules:
- Put your main information first
Write an introduction (as seen above) that sums up your article, then delve deeper into the topic throughout the text. - Structure your text with catchy headlines and format it using headings
- Work with lists
People (and the machines) like lists like this list!
Step 5 — Refine: write to be read
So, the house is standing, now you get to take care of the interior design.
Here is (another!) list of editorial guidelines to writing to keep your text comprehensible and your readers interested:
- Write briefly, clearly, and democratically
Write in short sentences (14–20 words) and avoid nesting. Put things as simple as possible and don’t use complicated formulations. Also: don’t use difficult words or very specific technical terms just to show off. Be understandable. People will think of you as smart when they read that good, helpful text of yours. That’s enough. - Use an active voice and write vividly
Produce a lively text by writing in the active voice. “The author writes the text”, in contrary to “The text is written by the author”. Got it? - Make use of the verbal form whenever possible instead of nouns.
“A thorough structuring of the text is needed for the maintainance of reader’s interest and search engine optimization alike” as opposed to “Structure your text to maintain the readers’ interest and to optimize it for search engines.” Which one sounds better?
Step 6 — Go meta: Accessibility, metadata and SEO
Ace Access
Be sure to make your content readable to everyone by adding captions to your images or add descriptive alt-text. Alt-text is text that is read out by screenreaders to visually impaired users. And the text that is shown when you hover the mouse over an image or the image is not displayed.
Metadata and SEO
Sounds booooring? Good news! It isn’t, because it’s helpful.
And even more good news?
You have taken care of most of it already by working with keywords and using the headlines for structuring your text! The machines can make use of all these things pretty well, but there’s just a little bit more you have to feed them with and they will be happily delivering your content piece way up in those search results!
Here is a quick introduction to metadata that will help you out for starters.
Congratulations!
You made it to the end of the article! If that is the case the six steps of the process I applied while writing this blog post have actually helped putting together a working piece of content. I hope they can do that for your webwriting too!
Image Credits: all images are based on art from the Noun Project
(1) keywords by Ben Davis
(2) audience by Cuby Design
(3) think by Linda
(4) build by Ralf Schmitzer
(5) clean by Flatart
(6) build by Creative Stall
