When people come to your web site, they know exactly what they want, they are hungry for more information, and very impatient to be fed.  The challenge for web site editors is to let these hungry souls choose from the menu quickly and easily, and get straight to the main course.  This requires a different style of writing to traditional media, it requires embracing the discipline of web authoring.

If there is one word which universally summarises web users, it is the word impatient.  Users scan read, they are obsessed with headings which match their needs and they jump from one piece of content to another.  They are online to carry out an action and are looking for the key button, link or piece of text to allow them to fulfil that action.  Consider the following top ten tips when you are writing content for the web.

1. Burn your Ego

Don’t naval gaze.  Don’t be fixated with how good you or your company is.  Take a leaf from the Microsoft website, or the Dell website, and provide your users with actions which will fulfil their needs.  If you provide them with what they want, you won’t have to worry about marketing spiel.

2. Know your Audience

Tied in with this, know who comes to your site and why.  Get a picture for their demographics, their values, their needs, why they are at your site and how you can help.  Your audience isn’t everyone.  The cliché from 1996 that the web opens your business to a worldwide audience is nonsense – your targeted audience will be just as defined as it is in your business currently.  Get to know them.

3. Don’t copy Competitors

If you do this, your website will become a competition to prove whose daddy has the biggest car, and you will lose sight of your users.  By all means reference other websites, and take the good bits, but don’t become overwhelmed by them.

4. Publish Regularly

Web users are habitual.  Research suggests that most web users now visit less than 10 sites per week.  They don’t adventure or wander – they know what they want and where to go to get it.  Publish to a defined pattern.  Update your site every day, or every week, or every month, depending on your business.  And do it at the same time, it should be the same time every day, or the same day every week and so on.  Your users will get used to it and appreciate it.

5. Less is More

As your readers are impatient, keep headings below 10 words, keep sentences below 20 words, keep paragraphs below 75 words and keep pages to less than 500 words.  This suits the needs of the scan reader perfectly.

6. Make Content Active

Each piece of information should lead to action or a clear next step.  Rather than having a link which reads “Click here for more information”, call the link “Examine return on investment with our online calculator.”  The user will want to do something – help them.

7. No Cul de Sacs

Don’t lead your users up a dead end.  Always make the next steps or related steps obvious.

8. Write for Search

Include key phrases naturally within your prose.  For instance if you own a hotel in Belfast, the most relevant phrase users and search engines will be interested in is the phrase “hotels in Belfast”.  Make sure that phrase is used throughout your text – it will help users and search engines alike get relevant traffic to your site.

9. Prioritise Meta Data

The six honest serving men of web content – what, why, when, how, where and who of your content.  It takes information written from your perspective and makes it accessible to your customers, from their perspective.  NEVER provide web content without meta content in it.

10. Facilitate your Users’ Needs

Be ruthless in your pursuit of serving the user.  The more you think of their needs, and the more you resist the temptation to think in your own terms and language, the more successful your website will be.