Writing Web Page Content
Writing content for your corporate web pages is hard for most of us. You know so much about your own business, and you see it from the perspective of a supplier - not your customer or a prospective customer.
The art is to understand who you want to visit your page - and your business, and what they will need. Your writing needs to be good for humans and for the search engine spiders, but in many ways they have similar needs.
A good page:
- is focussed at the viewer/reader; it addresses his/her concerns and connects with one audience. If you have more than one audience, then do separate pages for each. (The AIDA phrase is a good one to hang onto.)
- has text about one topic; this means that introductory pages which introduce several topics will tend not to do well in search engines but are good for humans in providing context.
- has a strong main heading (using the H1 tag), and then a short crisp top paragraph; both of these must carry the main keywords by which you want this page to be found. Include other keywords in subsequent headings and paragraphs.
- avoids content which will obviously date (unless it can be updated regularly)
- avoids phrases like 'coming soon', 'under construction' etc; all good websites have content in this state so unless it really is coming soon, don't mention it. "Research News Summer 2004 - coming soon" in 2010 says "This site does not get updated".