Attracting, capturing and engaging readers’ long-term interests on the web today can be extremely challenging. Studies have shown that over half of all website visitors stay on a web page for 15 seconds or less. Upwards of 1.9 billion websites currently exist in cyberspace and over 3.5 billion Google searches are performed daily, according to online statistic experts.
For this reason, it is a daunting task to grab and hold the attention and interests of web users. With about 350,000 tweets being sent out from Twitter each minute of the day and night and other social media sites buzzing with activity, you need top-tier content on your website to withstand this huge maze of competition and gain conversions. Yet with determination, you can prevail, build your website business and succeed.
Essential Rules for Creating Top-Quality Content for Your Website
Important rules for crafting highly effective content for your website include the following:
1. Understand Your Audience and Speak Concisely. Know your target audience well and speak to them directly and concisely in your site’s textual content. More web users will read and relate to your content if you write in short sentences that are clear and easy to comprehend and remember.
Write for both your primary target audience and a secondary audience. Your secondary readers may be other website owners in your profession, area of e-commerce or type of web marketing.
2. Use Active Voice and the “Inverted Pyramid” Model. In your written web content and any audio-visual presentations, use active instead of passive verbs. Rather than stating, “Our products can be purchased on this web page,” write or say, “Purchase our products on this web page.” Your audience will react more strongly when you address them directly.
Build your content in the form of an inverted pyramid or cone. By placing the most important information at the page top, you can capture and engage your readers. Underneath, you can add specific details and supporting or helpful data. For example, if you are creating a performance event web page, the title, theme, date and location of the event would appear at the top of the pyramid with supporting information following below.
3. Vary Word Choice and Create Scannable Text. Your readers will react best when you use a variety of words in your website text. To help vary your word choices, try using word clouds. If you copy and paste text into a free word cloud tool, a cloud will be generated. The words with the largest print in the cloud are the ones that you use the most, and you should replace them with appropriate synonyms for best results.
Be sure to make your textual content easily scannable. Use subheadings throughout, and divide blocks of text into bullet points and numbered paragraphs or lists. Your site visitors will remain on your web pages to read content more frequently if it is easy to skim through and understand quickly. Also use the same terms and keywords throughout for best SEO results and to avoid reader confusion.
4. Integrate Multimedia and Layer Text. Use dynamic and informative images, graphics, charts and videos in your site content. Research has shown that web users process visual data 60,000 times more rapidly than written text.They also remember it longer and more vividly.
By using internal links to direct site visitors to visuals and data on other pages of your site, you can layer your text and improve your website SEO significantly. You can also strengthen your visitors’ attention by linking to external sites with information that is relevant to your own site’s content. Just remember to limit hyperlinks to a reasonable, pleasing number.
