How to Write Successfully for the Web: Humans vs. Search Engines

Most people think that writing for the web is same thing as writing a high school essay or writing to friends, but it really isn't. When you write content for the web you should be on the lookout for a number of things you would not usually be concerned with in any other written document; as well as things you would be. You need to ensure that your web content not only makes sense to human beings but also to search engines. Human beings are looking for information in your web content while search engines, on the other hand, are looking for anything that shows that the information you have to share is relevant enough to be included in their list of search results for related information.

Keywords are one way of ensuring that search engines successfully index your web content. Keywords are specific phrases that humans use in search engines when searching for information about particular subject topics. Keywords should be used reasonably in web content material and being reasonable usually requires anything from 1 to 3 keywords per 100 words (this is ‘keyword density’). You should also avoid creating content that is keyword-laden for search engines but makes a boring read for human beings. Good web content must satisfy both purposes in order to make your content a success on the web.

You will need to avoid duplicate content where search engines are concerned. Just as human beings are concerned about plagiarism, search engines don't tend to look too favorably on you when your content looks like it was lifted from somewhere else. Your content may read properly and have all the required keywords and meet other search engine requirements but it may suffer by being inappropriately ranked, a punishment certain search engines use for suspected duplicate content.

When writing, other than making sure your content has the right keywords to be noticed by search engines, and avoiding duplicate content; you also need to be concerned with readability. You will need to format your content in a way that makes it easy to read with the right punctuation, and you need to format blocks of content separately in relevant paragraphs. Never lump your content together in a way that makes it difficult to read and discern the various sub-topics in the same content. It can be annoying and a reader will simply choose to seek for their information elsewhere. This is true in all writing, but web surfers are a notoriously picky bunch.

You should take the appropriate care to tailor your content to meet your audience’s needs. If you are writing stuff that people with only a high school education will read, don't make it sound like a college thesis. On the other hand, if you are writing material for a highly technical audience, maintain a professional literary standard.

The ultimate way to write successfully for the web is to strike a balance between what your human readers want and what search engines are looking for. Search engine requirements tend to differ from Google to Yahoo and in certain other aspects they share similar characteristics, there is a tendency for these requirements to evolve so you need to keep yourself informed of search engine news, and incorporate these new developments into your content, in order to make sure you are always tagged as relevant.

By
Mike Dias
http://www.m6.net/