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How To Write For The Web

Writing for the Web is considerably different from other forms of writing. The audience is impatient, and the writer must capture the viewer’s attention as quickly as possible. Short, pointed sentences are good, and bulleted points are even better.

In addition, Web readers want information, now -- quick, simple, digestible information.

Interestingly, some of the main Web informational outlets aren’t optimized for web viewing. For instance, few news outlets have abandoned the inverted pyramid style for the more digestible format of bulleted points, linking within text, and eye-relaxing white space.

Worse, many of these informational outlets are heavy on animated advertising – and though this brings in the bacon, it distracts the reader from the information on the page and ultimately may cause him to abandon the site.

The best Web writing adheres to these elements:

• Short, pithy sentences and paragraphs
• An informal and approachable writing style
• Lots of bulleted points
• Accurate, predigested information
• Simple formatting of the page
• Continually-fresh information to bring the reader back
• Quality links that help the reader expand the information he’s curious about
• Keyword-optimized writing to increase ranking in search engines

Less-than-great Web writing has these qualities:

• Long-winded sentences and paragraphs
• A dull style, or an overly-relaxed style (you want to feel comfortable on a web page, but too much informality is as bad as too much formality)
• Unbroken paragraphs that go all the way across the page
• Incorrect, dated, overly-complex, or (worst) plagiarized information
• Lots of advertising and gee-whiz qualities to the page
• Static, stale pages of information
• Pointless links, or nonexistent links; no support for the information provided
• Overuse of keywords, drawing web spiders and ranking well but reading like a list of keywords

Check out your web pages. Do they have a problem? If you're not drawing traffic, or if your traffic isn't converting to sales, it could just be that your text is not engaging, easy to read, or optimized. Of all the problems your website could have, this is among the simplest to fix, with fresh pithy content.