When you are writing articles for websites, there are different strategies to keep your audience engaged than when you are writing for print. With the "Google-it" generation in full effect, we need to keep things short, sweet, and to the point.
What This Means for You
When you decide to write your own sales copy, website articles, or ezine articles, there is a particular unwritten set of rules that you should follow to keep your copy from adding to the site's bounce rate. If you keep just a few simple guidelines in mind, your articles will be much more web friendly and more likely to draw rather than lose traffic.
No Keyword Stuffing
Okay, so someone told you that a great way to fool the search engines is to put so many keywords into your articles that they are nearly unreadable. Guess what? They were wrong. Search engines are catching on, and some of the bigger ones (like Google) are taking action. If you don't want your web site to be banned, try to keep your keyword saturation below 8%.
Be Concise
Readers online are not settling down to a cup of coffee and a good article, they are looking to find the information and move on. If you are particularly good, you get the much sought after bookmark. What this means is don't bother posting it if it is not relevant or useful. It also means that you can cut down on the word count. Pieces that receive the most attention are only about 500-750 words long. The internet is not a place for wordiness or artful prose; most of the visitors are looking for instant gratification. If you can't scan it and pick out the good parts easily, start over.
Proof It
A big no-no in article writing is to write it once and read it once. Why is this? When you are rushing through your copy, you can easily miss several spelling and grammatical errors. Also, if you do not bother reading it out loud, then you may find that the piece was barely readable. When you read your own writing to yourself it almost always makes sense. When you read it out loud you hear yourself reading it the way other people will. This is where you can pick out the whoppers such as run on sentences, double negatives, and overuse of a word.
No Copy is Better Than Bad Copy
If you are careful in your article writing and keep these very simple guidelines in mind, your content can be an asset to your site and products. If you prefer to breeze through it and pay your copy little attention, you may find that you are losing more prospective customers that before you had posted your content. Why? Bad copy is like wearing tee shirts to the office, it's just not professional. Customers want to believe that they are doing business with someone that is going to handle them professionally. If you give the appearance of someone that doesn’t bother to read what they are posting on his site, why would they think that you would handle them any more seriously?
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