Writing for the Internet can be very different from writing offline – for one thing the medium behaves in a very different manner, and so do your readers when they’re reading on the Internet. It’s important to know what to look out for so your readers don’t lose interest but it’s also important to know how to make the most of the medium. The Internet is a fast-paced world where patience is short; information travels fast and ‘interactive’ is the buzzword!
If you’ve decided to explore the Internet as a medium for your work, then here are some pointers to get you on your way to writing for the web.
- Keep it simple – Write short, simple sentences that are easy to understand. Your reader will spend all of a few seconds skimming through the text on the page before moving on, so get their attention with short, snappy text.
- Avoid marketing spiel – Don’t sell your work to your audience – help them make choices; don’t push anything down their throats! The Internet is popular as a self-select medium, where the readers choose what they’d like to do and what they’d like to read. Forcing marketing speak onto them won’t win you any laurels or any repeat visitors.
- Keep it short – Patience is in short supply on the Internet, so stick to short sentences, short paragraphs and short web pages. Anything long will result in your reader exiting your page or clicking away to some other site.
- Be direct and talk to your reader – Make liberal use of words like you or your, use active verbs, be friendly and chatty if possible and get the reader involved in your piece of writing.
- Make it interactive – Writing on the web can be made interactive through the use of questions addressed to the reader, actions you require them to perform – like clicking to page 2 of an article or rolling a mouse over a word to see what it means, and through the popular medium of comment sections. The ‘comments from readers’ serve as a guide for writers to keep their work relevant and also create a platform for interaction between readers and writers.
- Be bold! – Use bold text, and catchy headings and sub headings to break up sections of the text. They also help you highlight the bits you don’t want the reader to miss. Effective headlines and sub headings can help you retain a reader and make them linger on your page for those crucial extra seconds that are needed to make them stay on your site.
- Demonstrate credibility – Quote sources, provide references, put in your qualifications, have credible people/organizations link in to your sites, offer testimonials/reviews – do what it takes to get the reader to believe in what you write. This will improve your chances of getting publicity from positive word of mouth and may win you regular repeat traffic as well.
- Keep it up to date – Information travels fast in the web space, so be prepared to update your data and facts regularly to keep your writing current and relevant. Remove outdated pieces of writing, replace them with newer things. One way to do this, without ‘getting rid of’ your old work, is to use online archives on your web site.
- List it! – Use bullet points and lists to communicate instead of long paragraphs; this is known to get the attention of online readers better than plain text.
- Be upfront and direct – Put your key points upfront – readers rarely read to the end of a page. In fact, work in the opposite way from what you might offline. Start with the key points of your discussion and your overall conclusion/inference of the facts. Then get into the details and explain why you feel/think that way.
- Get linked up – Include links within your writing; it helps hold people’s attention and helps them understand what the content is all about. You could have links to your own work so that you don’t lose the reader to another web site. There are those who even go so far as to claim that writing on the Internet without the use of links isn’t online writing at all!
- Use keywords – Make sure your text contains keywords as they would be searched for by readers on search engines. Don’t rely only on proprietary names or technical terms to get you the right readership – people are more likely to be hunting using generic names and colloquial terms. For instance, people may not hunt for ‘Better Banker’s Combo account’; they are more likely to be searching for ‘current and savings accounts’;. Similarly, people will more likely look for ‘stroke’ than ‘cerebral infarct’.
- Write the metadata too! – Apart from the visible text, some search engines also hunt out metadata, which are the tags you attach to your page. Adding this in as you go along will help improve the reach and volume of your readership by getting your work up on the search rankings. This is no longer the only factor search engines look at, but it doesn’t hurt to cover all bases. Think of it as the Index of a book – you may not actually use it to hunt out something, but if you do, it helps.
- Write for the world, but focus on your audience – You’ll need to ensure that your writing talks to the readers you are looking for and is relevant to them. But remember, a good part of your audience may not be native English speakers. Your content and writing, however, may be equally relevant to them and could even win you publishing contracts overseas. To address this audience, keep the language basic, clear and uncomplicated.
- Proof it! – Proofread your writing and check all links to make sure they work. There is nothing more annoying than links that don’t work or wrongly spelt words that stand out in all their undignified glory.
For more on writing for the web, check out our feature on ‘How people read on the web’.
Please Note: Chillibreeze does not endorse techniques or views mentioned in the articles here. The articles listed here are provided as reference material for writers as a support service.
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