Web Writing Guidelines
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
The best guidelines for web writing were written by Jacob Nielsen in 1997, in the ages of internet Pliocene you’d had to wait 2 seconds to load 4 kB of text. Search engines and social media have changed the web since for a little bit. Best practices evolved and many users learned to read, but …
Never changing best practices
Microcontent: page title tags, headlines
Title tags, headings should make sense out of context.
Microcontent needs to be pearls of clarity. You get up to 65 characters to explain your macrocontent.
Titles longer than 65 characters are concatenated in search results, so don’t waste your ink.
Unless the title or heading make it absolutely clear what the page is about, users will never read it, because they won’t find it in Google.
Headings are often displayed out of context. Headline text has to stand on its own. Written in plain language. Make the first word an important, information-carrying one.
Scannable text structure
- Use rich semantic markup
- Meaningful sub-headings (not “clever” ones)
- use unordered and ordered lists, where appropriate
- one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph)
- the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
- Highlighted keywords: hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; use bold for
<strong>emphasis and italic for disturbing-kind-of-<em>phasis.
Concise / objective language
Users appreciate professional advice, not promotional language. Keep commercial language to a minimum. Credibility suffers when readers (the human scanners) clearly see your writing exaggerates. Promotional language has naturally far lower density of common search phrases. If you’re in a hurry and can hear bla, bla ,bla.. when you read the copy, it means that the content is very poor on search phrases.
Useful information
- credible facts
- tips and tricks
- bits of know-how
A wall of text is deadly for an interactive experience. Search engines employ clever algorithms (and a lot of human beings) to find out whether your content is useful or a spam. Keep in mind the language of searchers when writing for the web.
Inverted Pyramid writing style
Start with conclusions or short summary and continue with generic info. further down the copy. Users (and Search engines) consider top of the article more important or at least they read it first. First and last paragraphs need to hold the semantic value, search phrases. This is completely different compared to printed media, where conclusions are usually on the end of the article.
So what do you think?
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