Posted by Nabha
This is condensed from various sources, including especially Jakob Nielsen’s articles on Writing for the Web.
Why do you need to know how to write for SEO?
If you spend time writing any of the following:
- Page titles (the <title> tag)
- Page descriptions
- Link text
- Page content, including the main headline
… the advice in this post will help your writing be more effective, and more likely to be read.
Writing for the web is different
Online reading is a new phenomenon. Accordingly, writing for the web has evolved a set of requirements different from print publishing.
People scan rather than read
Are you scanning this post? When reading online, people’s attention span is much shorter than when they read printed copy. People scan web pages.
Imagine people driving through your website at 60 mph, treating the site as a series of billboards rather than reading it carefully.
Get a second opinion
We are very close to our writing. Ask someone else to read your piece. Have you made all your points clear?
"Sleep on it" overnight to gain a new perspective.
Less is more
Take what you would write for print, and cut it in half. Then cut it in half again!
It sounds drastic, but the researchers who study people’s web reading habits insist on this formula.
Strunk and White wrote in The Elements of Style:
"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts."
Exception to Less is More
On a website I worked on, the copy to describe a course grew by 5 times. The reason was the course’s high price. People need sufficient information to make a decision involving a lot of money.
To offset the increase in copy, we did the following:
- Used bullets
- Edited it carefully
- Split it into 5 pages
Afterwards, we saw a marked increase in attendance.
The opposite is also true: the less commitment a person needs to make, the less copy there should be.
Use words that everyone can understand
Avoid, replace, or define industry terms or other "in-house" terminology. This includes acronyms. If the reader doesn’t understand your words, they will tune you out.
The title is the most important part
Make the title engaging to the reader. More than anything else, the title determines whether or not people will click through from the search engines.
If you can, match the title of a page to its main headline, so that after people click on through from a search engine, they will feel that they’ve come to the right place. More than anything else in your page content, the headline determines whether or not people will read the page.
Short paragraphs
Draw the reader in by making the first paragraph short.
Text surrounded by white space attracts the eye, and offers a "minimal friction entry point." All other paragraphs can be 1 to 5 sentences long.
The first 2 words: especially important for SEO
The first 2 words in a paragraph or bullet point often determine whether people will want to read the rest. Think of this when you’re writing titles, especially, for titles are almost never read carefully!
Numerals
Numerals (2, 3, etc.) are more likely to be read than numbers that are spelled out (two, three, etc.)
Lists
Use bullets or numbered lists: they are easy to scan. People notice the items at the top and the bottom the most.
Adjectives
Use them sparingly. New writers especially should avoid adjectives, which tend to add emotional coloring instead of content.
Editing
If you do the work of editing, the reader won’t have to. If you don’t, the reader may not do the work (of reading) at all!
One author I know has edited his writing as much as 50 times. And I once read a grammar book that said: "Avoid even a split-second of confusion." Good advice for the web.
This is my first contribution to SEOmoz; I hope you enjoyed it. Please share your thoughts in the comments. For further reading, I recommend:
Additional Information
How Users Read on the Web
Copywriting 101(entertaining and good, geared toward online marketing)
50 Writing Tools
Test readability grade level with the Gunning Fog Index For context: many newspapers are written at 8th grade level; TV Guide and Mark Twain books are written at the 6th grade level. The lower the grade level you write for, the more people will understand it.
Books
The Elements of Style by Strunk and White
50 Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark
Credits
Most of the advice here comes from Jakob Nielsen, a widely known researcher and authority in the field of usability (that which makes a website easy for people to use).
His research involves using eye-tracking devices, which measure and record the way people’s eyes travel when they look at a webpage.
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