How to Write Great Content for Your Website
Summary - How to write, position and format great content that empowers and informs your website visitors.
What Is Great Content?
In the context of service industry websites (which is our focus), great content gives the visitor exactly what they want from your website: information. A website with great content will also become more attractive to search engines like Google; boosting you higher to the first page.
People Don’t Read.
According to usability studies by Dr. Jakob Nielsen, the “guru of webpage usability” said The New York Times, few people read everything on a web page. Why? Because people’s attention spans are lower these days and so is their patience. Users want to find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. So instead of reading an entire webpage they scan the page looking for whatever stands out. If what they’re looking for isn’t found quickly, the visitor will move to the next site.
Here’s what to do about it:
Structure Your Content
The main goal is to find information, so it’s important to place important information first, at the top of the page; make it stand out; use larger headings. Summarize your information in a short paragraph at the very top. A summary helps users determine if the page, is indeed, what they are looking for.
Instead of writing a big paragraph, break up the paragraphs into smaller ones, perhaps no more than four lines per block. Use bold sub-headings to start off the new paragraphs. Use bullets and numbered lists when stating facts. This sets up your content to be scanned by users first, and then read in its entirely, when ready.
Paragraph Structure
Start the paragraph with the most important point and then expand on this for the rest of the paragraph. If the first line doesn’t interest the reader, they may skip the rest of the paragraph.
Give answers before explanations, give summaries before details and give conclusions before discussions. Always keep your information short and to the point.
Note: Spacing the lines within large amounts of content makes it more reader-friendly; this is called line-height and it’s a CSS styling technique we employ in many of our websites.
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