Writing Effective Text for Your Website
Literary scholars beware! This tutorial is not to teach people how to write well, it is in fact designed to show people how writing for the web can impact their website’s search results. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write engaging and well-thought-out text, but it does mean that you may want to think like a marketing guru instead of an English professor.
The Goals
The goal of writing text for your website is two-fold:
- Tell the user what your company does and why they should utilize your company.
- Tell search engines what your web page is about and how they should categorize your company.
The two goals can be somewhat conflicting, but careful planning can reduce the tug-of-war that you may have with the two goals.
Goal 1: Telling your story
This part is usually easier to write. After all you are simply communicating with your audience what you do and why they should choose you. Be careful not to go too in depth, user's attention span on the web are very short so you should highlight the most important things only.
Don’t forget the call to action. Do you want them to contact you? Make sure your number is on every page or a link to your contact form is within the text itself.
Goal 2: Telling Google your story
Writing text for Google is a bit more straightforward, but this is also why it is so tough. Google doesn’t care about your flowery writing technique or your use of large adjectives. Google’s goal is to determine what each web page is about by reading all the text and seeing what words are used the most often.
If you want someone to find your business on Google by typing in “Overland Park Widgets,” then you better have “Overland Park Widgets” in text on your site. Maybe even a couple of times if it is really important. Figure out how to include your keywords in your text as often as possible throughout your website.
Another thing you must know about Google is that Google loves links. So add a link named “Widgets” on your website that goes to a “Widgets” page. This tells Google that “Widgets” is a major keyword; heck it must be if you have a whole page about it.
Tip: Make sure your links are created with text and not images. It seems like a pretty simple thing but many web designers cut corners and use images rather than plain text to create websites. This practice will hurt your search engine optimization (SEO).
Conclusion
Writing text for your website doesn’t have to be a difficult and daunting task. Chances are that if you write text that speaks to your users than you will probably have your keywords included in your text. Make a list of keywords before you get started and see if you can incorporate them into your site. Tekniq can assist you with any keyword analysis and search engine optimization that you may have. Just contact us.
Created 01/05/10. Copyright © 2010 Tekniq Data Corp.
