How to Create Web Content that Works
Create Good and Effective Web Content
- The web is like a
battleground where you are continuously fighting against so many factors
to grab the attention of the reader. He has unread messages in Gmail,
someone pinged him on Facebook – there are so many distractions that it
will be hard to hold his attention. If your content is short, precise
and well-presented, he will appreciate it.
- People on the web
have short attention spans – they’ll read the headline of your story and
probably the first few lines and then zoom off. Thus you should use the
inverted pyramid
approach to catch their attention – put the most important parts of the
story at the top that can be seen without using the scroll bar.
- The
headline is almost as important as the story because it will be visible
in search engines, RSS readers, email newsletters and social shares.
Good headlines are like short summaries of the article but free of
jargon – the reader should be able to guess what the article is all
about just from the headline itself. Here are some good headlines.
- Eye-tracking studies suggest that people don’t read web pages, they scan pages in an F-Pattern.
Thus you need to present content in such a fashion that important parts
don’t go unnoticed. Add a table of content if you have a long article.
Use headings and sub-headings (like h2, h3, etc.), add captions to
images, use italics or bold text to emphasize important points and put
interesting information in pull quotes. Use short paragraphs and each
paragraph should convey exactly one idea.
- When you are writing
on the web, you are writing for a global audience and therefore you
should avoid using jargon or complex language in your content. Make no
assumptions – you know what NSFW stands for but not everyone does so
spell out the acronyms. Use humor and slangs with care as what’s
considered funny in your culture may not be so in other countries. Also
use the Readability Test to know if people who are less fluent in English can easily grasp your writing style.
- Sometimes
you have to use numbers in your content that can be difficult to
visualize. For instance, the US spent anywhere between $4-$6 billion
fighting the war in Iraq. How big is that number? If you can add another
number to the same story saying the US spent X amount on medical
research or that Y amount is enough to feed million people, your readers
will be able to connect better with your story. Apple didn’t stress the
number of pixels in the new iPad, they said it has more pixels that
your HDTV.
- When you are writing about a product, a service or
maybe a restaurant where you had dinner last night, try to put yourself
in the shoes of the reader and think what additional questions they may
have related to that topic. Your content should answer all of them. Your
aim should be create a page that is the best resource on the web for
that topic. Use Five Ws, a proven journalistic technique, to get the complete story on a subject.
- Make
sure that all information in your content is accurate and comes from
trusted sources. If you are using facts in your content – like the
average age of an African elephant is 70 years – you should cite
credible sources to support that fact.
- If you have an idea for a
story, don’t publish it right away – think over it for a day or two,
edit and the final product will almost always be better than your
initial draft. Darren Rowse calls it the idea marinating process.
- When
you are writing on a not-so-unique topic that dozens of other sites
have covered in the past, analyze what others have missed or how you can
make existing content better. For instance, you can include fresh data,
you can include quotes from experts, you can create videos around the
topic, you can present information in an alternate form – like a chart, a
presentation or even as an ebook.
- Spend some time reviving your
old content. Sometimes your content doesn’t get the attention it
deserves and it just sits there in the archives gathering dust. You can
use Google Analytics to learn about stories that didn’t click with your
readers, analyze the missing pieces, think how you can make the content
better, and push it again. If you include “factual” content on your site
– like which is the most popular social site – this kind of data needs
to be updated regularly because that what your readers will like.
- The
content that you create must be readable across difference devices and
platforms that your audience are on. Often times we create content that
looks good on the desktop but that quality is lost as soon as we switch
to a different device – say a mobile phone. That’s a missed opportunity.
If you have embedded YouTube videos in your content, make sure you
offer an alternative thumbnail that links to the YouTube video for
environments that don’t support Flash or HTML5.
- Users will
consume your content in different forms. Some will save your stories to
InstaPaper for reading later, some will print your articles as PDFs
while others may send your stories to their Kindle. It is important that
your content looks good when it is saved across different mediums. Do
not ignore the print stylesheet because if you create good content, some
people will print it on paper.
- The
first image and the thumbnail image of your story, or the image that
your have specified inside the OpenGraph tags, should be clear,
high-quality and predictable. That’s because these images will appear
when your stories are shared on social networks like Pinterest, Tumblr,
Facebook and even Google Plus. You may have a great headline but if
the attached image thumbnail isn’t great, the story can sometimes go
unnoticed.
- The other reason to have good images in your content
is that they “pause” a reader when he or she is scanning your content.
Use an image format
depending upon the content of the image – for instance, images that
have text are best served as PNG files. Avoid using stock images on your
content especially the ones that are very common. Use the Similar Images option is Google Images to determine how popular a “stock image” is and if it returns too many results, don’t use that image.
- Do
not ignore video. It does take some effort to produce videos but it
will be well worth the effort. YouTube is the world’s second largest
search engine and if your produce video content, you have an opportunity
to show up there. Also, Google is no longer a collection of 10 blue
links but a mixture of images and videos. Good videos have great audio.
Shoot and record at 720p (1280×720). Apply to become a YouTube partner
and that will help you add custom thumbnail images to your videos. Keep
you video length short, really short because it is difficult to hold a user’s attention for more than a few minutes.
- SEO is no rocket science. This starter guide
[PDF] from Google covers nearly everything that you need to do to make
your good content more search friendly. Use good headlines, the content
should be scannable, use good-quality images with captions, have an easy to navigate site structure and use Sitemaps to help search bots discover your content. Here’s more useful SEO advice from Google.
- You should know how people are consuming and sharing your content. The new social analytics
feature of Google Analytics can help track most of the social activity
happening on your site and, accordingly, you can put the right social
sharing buttons around your content.
- You may think that Page
Views are the best indicator to determine the success of content but
that may not be the case. A reader lands on your page from Facebook,
scans it for a second, doesn’t find anything interesting and leaves.
This activity registers as a pageview in Google Analytics but the
visitor didn’t find anything useful. The metric that gives a better idea
of user behavior is “average time spent on a page” – if they are just
coming and leaving, there’s definitely something wrong with the page
content or there’s a mismatch between your headlines and the story.
- You
might think that the web has an infinite appetite for content and the
more you feed it, the better. That’s not the case though. It takes
effort, time and lot of thinking to produce good and useful content and
that will clearly not happen if the goal is to publish as many words as
possible in a day.
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