13 Tips Guaranteed to Make your Website Work for You

Writing for a website is different from any other kind of writing. People who surf the Web are usually looking for information quickly and they won’t spend a lot of time on your site if you don’t give them what they’re looking for quickly. Reading online is about 25 percent slower than other reading so people will be scanning your site to get the information they want. Generally that means you should write about 50 percent less than you would for other media.

Here are a few tips from Rick Simmons, Chief Solutions Officer at Dinkum Interactive, a Philadelphia Search Marketing Company specializing in online visibility and the methods to get your brand in front of potential customers.

  1. Know your target audience – speak to them in their terms, tell them “What’s in it for me” quickly
  2. Pick your keywords that people are using to get to your website and make sure they appear in your copy with as much frequency as possible without making the writing stilted and repetitive
  3. To do search engine optimization, you need to have 250 – 300 words of copy on each page being optimized for the search engines to read them
  4. Your copy content should be in a format such as HTML – search engines cannot read graphics
  5. Use a title on every page to help identify what’s on it for your audience
  6. Keep it short – that means sentences and paragraphs, broken up with subheads and lots of white space
  7. Keep your language simple, conversational and personal– it’s all about the authentic voice. Avoid jargon.
  8. The most important information should be toward the top of the page so people don’t have to scroll down to get to the good stuff
  9. Unlike traditional print, use a sans serif typeface, which is easier to read on a screen
  10. Use bold face and italics for emphasis
  11. Pretend I’ve already spoken to your two biggest competitors – why should I use your services, what’s different about you?
  12. Have a call to action. What do you want people to do now? Just having a contact button is not enough
  13. Consider having video on your site now that most folks now have broadband