How to write for web pages

I have talked about the importance of content, the need for content in your website, and how SEO and content works together.

But why is content so important?
Is it because of the informative value or is it beacuse of the way it is presented?

I would say a bit of both.

When we say that content is all important, we certainly do not mean any content or just pages and pages of content. Essentially it is the arrangement and presentation of content on the web page such that it is of value to both visitors and search engines.

Is there a limit to how much content can be posted on a page?

One may post as much as they like, but this largely depends upon the topic and your audience.

If you are publishing a research article about “Dolphins and their habitat”, you may want to have longer pages with a lot of content because your target visitors would like to have as much information as possible. The other option would be to have a separate white paper section from where people can download more content.

But if your website is about products or services, you may want to reduce your content to easily readable paragraphs. In fact I have found that structuring content into logical sequences is perhaps the best ways of presenting it. A scientific approach to presenting content on web pages so that it benefits you and your visitors is a very good starting point.

Mentioned below are points that you might want to consider when working on the content for your website:-

1. Does your content need to be re-written for the web?
2. How many products/services do you offer?
3. Do you need a separate page for each product?
4. How do you plan to present it?
5. How many levels does your website have?

Since the attention spans of most visitors are really low on the internet, what needs to be the focus is how to present the content such that visitors stay on the page.

Some of the logical ways of going about it is by providing –

1. An attractive heading
2. Breaking up the content into meaningful paragraphs
3. Providing sub headings
4. Including images, in order to break the boredom

Most people scan the topics and subtitlesof a page. If they find that the content interests them and is persuasive enough, they might stay on and read further.

The objective of writing engaging content is to retain your visitor’s attention, provide them the answers that they are looking, and engaging them so that they take the required action, it could be either by subscribing to your newsletters, or by buying your products/services, or any other action that you wish them to take.

Therefore it is imperative to ensure that the objective of your web site and the content strategy are in sync, before finalizing the content of a website. Providing content just for the sake of it or because search engines love content, will not help. Visitors have to like what you provide, they have to find value in your content, and more importantly they have to convert into paying customers.

Content does play a vital role but are we using content sensibly?