How to Write Copy for the Internet

Well written web copy is a crucial tool for attracting and keeping web site readers. One of the key (but often overlooked) features of a great Web site is the quality of its written content. Many Web designers spend hours coding the Web site and ignore the need to produce readable content that meets the needs of the Web site’s visitors. Quite simply, no matter how good your Web site looks, if its content is bad, visitors wont come to it and they won’t stay.

Keep it simple

The trick to writing good Web content is to keep your text short so that it can be easily digested by your visitors. Most people don’t read Web pages in the same way that they read words on the printed page. They don’t even read every word; instead, they skim the page and look for words and phrases that are relevant to them and to their interests.

Breaking the content into short paragraphs allows the visitor to read or skim a paragraph quickly to see if it contains something of interest. Where you can, break the text into bullet points, as these are easier to read and digest — use bullets where order isn’t important and use numbers or letters where it is.

When choosing your words, err on the side of simplicity and words that are in common use. A Web site isn’t the place to use 5 dollar words that require your reader to pick up a dictionary to understand what you mean.

Get the main points down first When ordering your content, place the most important and relevant content at the top of the page, so it is there where your visitor can see it the minute your page loads. When you are telling your story, tell it in the first sentence or paragraph and then expand on this in a similar way to how you might write a newspaper story. In a good newspaper story, you should be able to split the article in the middle; discard the bottom half, and the top half should still contain all the salient points of the story, albeit in a shorter format and with much less detail.

Write descriptive headings

Headings are a vital part of your Web page or blog and they’re important for search engines, too. While you might be tempted to use puns and smart headlines in your text and blog posts and while these look great in print, they are much less effective on the Web. The reason is that your pages are indexed for display in search engine results, and headings that are a pun or a play on words aren’t indicative of the page’s true content. You’re likely to have your page miss out on being in results that it should appear in, and instead have it appearing as a result in searches that it doesn’t relate to.

Even if your pages do show up in relevant search results, the absence of the text that makes the pun heading understandable will make it difficult for a reader to assess the relevance of your page, so they are likely to bypass it in favour of a more obviously relevant page. Instead, keep your headlines simple and explanatory of the page or blog post content.

Write the way you talk

Most of us can explain what our interests are and what our businesses do when we talk about them. However, place a monitor in front of many people and it all gets too hard and formal. On the Web, in most cases, we’d do better if we wrote pretty much the way we speak.

So, write in a style that is chatty yet informative, using words like ‘you’ and ‘they’ rather than ‘one’ or other stuffy forms of address. Write in the active voice rather than the passive voice—when you write in the active voice, your writing has more punch and it is generally shorter and more concise, too.

What to write about

Write content that will appeal to your audience. Your Web site should be designed from your visitor’s point of view and provide them with what they want to read and learn about. So, make sure your writing focuses on what your visitor wants to read, not what you want to tell them — there is a big difference.

WIIFM (or what’s in it for me?), is the subconscious question a reader asks when they are reading your web site or blog content — they want to know how it affects them and what they have to gain from it. For your copy to work, you need to answer this question and do so early in your page or blog post to make sure they read on. You have to entice them into the content with an offer they can’t refuse.

Cutting to the chase

When you’re writing content for your Web site, do so in a simpel text editor. That way, you focus on the content and not on the coding or how it looks. Print a copy of your text and read through it carefully. Then remove extra adjectives and adverbs to tighten up your text and give it a punchier reading style. Well-written Web content will make your site approachable for your visitors and help you get your message across to them, whatever it might be.