by Anne R. Allen
These days, pretty much all writers need to learn to write Web content. Yes, even if you’re a Victorian romance author whose readers care more about reticules and spatterdashers than retweets and SEO. Even if you don’t have your own blog. Any website needs content. Plus you may want to plan a blog tour to promote your book launch, or guest on a blog for visibility. (Guest blogging is one of the best ways to market your book for free.)
Like it or not, all writers need to become “Web content providers” these days.
Yeah, I know. Sounds a lot less creative than “author” doesn’t it? And harder.
But it actually isn’t. Writing Web content is a little different from writing a traditional essay or magazine article, but it’s not hard. You just have to learn some basic guidelines.
Learning to Write Web Content Involves Unlearning
Especially what you were taught about paragraphing.
According to Mike Blankenship at Smart Blogger, the paragraph has gone through radical changes in the 21st century. He says the 100-200 word standard paragraph has disappeared. Now your average paragraph should be between two and four lines. You can go over and under — some paragraphs can be just one word long — but stay close to that average and you should be fine.
But don’t make them all the same length. Blankenship says, “Too many same-sized paragraphs in a row will bore your reader. It doesn’t matter if it’s too many small paragraphs or too many long paragraphs, the effect is similar.”
I had to unlearn a whole lot of what I was taught about writing prose back in the 20th century in order to be an effective Web content provider today. (Many thanks to my first online editor, Daryl Jung at the Canadian online zine Inkwell Newswatch.)
Back in the 20th century, good writers…
- Learned to use topic sentences and avoid cutting to a new paragraph until there’s a new topic.
- Wrote for people who paid money for a number of words and read every one.
- Wouldn’t put a title on a serious essay that looked like a cheap tabloid headline.
- Avoided repetition.
- Would never offer an outline instead of an essay.
- Substantiated information with footnotes.
- Never heard of tags, keywords, or SEO.
But the majority of people don’t read on the Internet; they skim. In fact, most people don’t even skim the whole article. Farhad Manjoo famously reported that only half the people who visit a website read past the first hundred words.
So how do you get them to come by…and stick around?
Forget all of the above and learn some new tricks:
1) Write Intriguing Titles
This is probably the most important aspect of learning to write Web content.
Mystery author C. Hope Clark once said in her “Funds for Writers” newsletter: “You might be surprised at the key factor I use in deleting or holding to read: The quality of the subject line. Hey, when time is crazy limited…the words have to snag me as I rush by. That means first and foremost that the subject be crisp, sharp, attractive, intriguing, or whatever adjective you want to use that gives me whiplash. It has to shout, “HEY, READ ME OR YOU’LL REGRET IT.”
She’s right.
Headers are the most important element of a blog’s content, and it’s the one most novelists don’t get. We want our blogs and newsletters to sound creative and literary like our books, not cheesy like a supermarket tabloid. But tabloid journalists are good at what they do. They have only a moment to grab a reader going through that checkout line, so they need an irresistible hook.
In our case, headers need to snag a reader in the endless stream of content Web browsers can choose from.
So how do we do that?
Here are 8 ways you can grab a Web reader’s attention with your story about, say, a writer who suspects her bathroom is haunted.
- Stir emotions: “The Tragic Ghost that Haunts my Bathroom.”
- Offer useful advice: “How to Make Sure a Building isn’t Haunted before you Sign that Rental Agreement.”
- You can sensationalize: “Why This Woman is Afraid of her own Bathroom!”
- Or appeal to sentiment: “This Story of a Cat and a Flapper’s Ghost Will Melt Your Heart.”
- Maybe stir up some greed: “How Wendy Writer inked a 7- Figure Deal with her Haunted Bathroom Story.”
- Paranoia is good: “Is Your Bathroom Haunted?” Or “Who or WHAT is Flushing Your Toilet in the Middle of the Night?”
- Curiosity, too: “10 Things You Don’t Know about Poltergeists.”
- Or you can appeal to thriftiness: “Save Money and Time with a Do-It-Yourself Exorcism.”
2) Promise a Fast Read
Everybody’s in a hurry online.
Author Jillian Mullin wrote in the Web Writer Spotlight: “Generally, an average Web user only spends 10 to 30 seconds reading Internet content. People rarely read web pages word-per-word. Instead, they scan the page for related keywords, bullet points, subtitles, and quotes.”
That’s why one of the best ways to let people know you’ve got a quick, easy-scan piece is with a numbered “listicle” like “The Top 10 Best Ghostwritten Books” or “5 Signs Your Computer is Possessed.”
The other thing is to learn to harness the power of white space. A page with lots of white space can be taken in at a glance.
I remember picking up a book my Yale-professor dad left in the living room when I was about 8 years old. It was thin and had lots of white space. An easy, quick read, I thought. So I sat down and read it before lunch. But the content was a bit disturbing. A mother did some really terrible things to the girl her husband was having an affair with. Then she killed her own kids.
It was the Robinson Jeffers translation of Euripides’ Medea. But hey, it was a quick read!
3) Pack Your Opener with Essential Information
Make sure your most important information is visible as soon as somebody opens the website. People do a lot of reading on phones and small tablets these days, so those first words are all-important.
It’s also what Google shows in the search results. And those opening words will help the search engine spiders decide what searches will pick it up, so you need some keywords there, too. (Spiders, or “crawlers” are the programs that examine websites so they can index them for the search engine. Spiders are our friends and help make us visible on the Web.)
Since most people won’t read past the second paragraph, you don’t want to save your best stuff for the end. Half a century ago, journalists were taught to “humanize” stories by starting with a human interest line.
“Wendy Writer shouldn’t have a care in the world. She’s a pretty thirty-something freelance writer living in a gorgeous Victorian triplex in Old Town. She’s sitting on the front porch of the house she moved into last month with her cat Hortense. The three-story home was once owned by one Mildred Biggins, who died in 1924…”
The reporter could wait to get to the lead (then known as the “lede” to differentiate from the metal originally used to make type) in the third or fourth sentence. Not so anymore. You’ve got to give people the facts in the first 50-60 characters.
50-60 characters. That’s all Google shows in the search results, so make those characters work hard.
Just say it: “Wendy Writer’s house is haunted by the ghost of Mildred Biggins.”
4) Make Your Title Shareable
You want your readers to share your piece and spread it around the Internet. Standard icons make sharing easy to established social media like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. So far we don’t have icons for the new platforms, but you can share the post manually. It needs to be shared. Otherwise nobody reads your piece but your mom, your cat and maybe the poltergeist that might be lurking in the upstairs bathroom.
This means we have to avoid those enigmatic, one-word headers that don’t give people any idea of your content. I remember a title that exemplified the kind of header that doesn’t work in the age of social media. The article was called “Ghosting.” It turned out to be about ghostwriting.
But you wouldn’t know from the title. It might have been a piece on Tinder dates who evaporate, or ectoplasmic apparitions, or that short-lived TV show. I didn’t have time to write a new header, so I didn’t retweet it.
You don’t want that to happen to your posts.
5) Use and Properly Format Sub-headers
Sub-headers are essential for drawing traffic and keeping it. They have three jobs:
- Emphasize your important points.
- Draw the eye through the piece.
- Signal your topics to search engines via keywords.
So if you’re writing about Mildred Biggins, you want to use sub-headers that contain keywords like ” ghost” “haunted,” and “poltergeist” , rather than “Flappers in the Night” or ” Mildred or Hortense…who’s Flushing the Toilet at 3 AM?” .
IMPORTANT: When writing for a blog, be sure to use the “header” and “sub-header” mode in your blog program, and not the “normal” or “paragraph” setting.
When I started blogging, I didn’t have a clue about formatting, and didn’t know that spiders don’t recognize “normal” text as a sub-header even if it looks like one to human eyes. Finally somebody told me about the importance of using the appropriate formatting and our blog stats soared.
6) Write in a Light, Conversational Style
Most websites are not the place to show off your encyclopedic vocabulary. If somebody has to click around to look up a word, they probably won’t come back.
Be careful about your use of jargon. Don’t write in geekspeak, legalese, or that “most scholars agree” phony-tony style you learned to use for college term papers.
Many tech people write in a language comprehensible only to them. It identifies them as “in the know.” But an “in crowd” piece isn’t going to get as much traffic as one that’s friendly and welcoming to all.
7) Shorten Sentences
We have little elves on this blog who rate my posts for “readability” before I post. The elves, aka algorithms, are courtesy of a WordPress plug-in called Yoast SEO. They give me a green light if I pass muster, an orange one if I’m getting too complex, and a red one if I’m moving into Ph.D. territory.
My most common offense? Long sentences. I was old school. I know how to compose and punctuate complex sentences and have fun writing them.
But it turns out Web readers don’t have so much fun reading them. And neither do the spiders. Once I started using Yoast, our traffic soared. As they say, “Yoast SEO does everything in its power to please both visitors and search engine spiders.”
It’s all about the spiders, people. 🙂
8) Format Web Content so it’s Easy to Skim
Skimming is easier with lists, bullet points, and bolding. Italics can be useful too — anything to draw the eye along the text.
A numbered list has a three-fold benefit:
- It provides lots of white space.
- And draws the eye through.
- Plus gives you a hook for your grabby title.
- Bullet points are good too. Like numbered lists, bullet points are easy to grasp at a glance and they let people know they’re getting the “good parts.”
- Bolding is powerful: It’s especially good for headers and other significant information.
- Italics provide emphasis: Putting a quote in italics sets it apart from the normal text.
9) Choose Informative Anchor Text for Hyperlinks
Hyperlinks are all-important in writing Web content.
What are hyperlinks? It’s okay to ask. I had no idea how to make a hyperlink for the first six months I blogged. You make a hyperlink when you turn an ugly URL like this: https://selfpublishingsites.com/2019/01/new-writing-scams-2019/ into a live bit of text that you can click on to take you to that address.
Don’t make the link with the word “here” or “this link.” That’s because the words “here” and “this link” don’t mean anything to those Google spiders.
So select the whole phrase and make the hyperlink to that. So you’d select the words, “New Writing Scams” and put in the URL to that post. (Like the ugly one above.)
Spiders only notice links with identifying text. So either use the title of the piece as I did above, or say something about it, like “Author hounded relentlessly by scam marketers”
10) Keep Keywords and SEO in Mind
I know SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of those jargon expressions that make most writers’ eyes glaze over.
But all you need to do is use simple keywords to help Google and other search engines find you. The best way to optimize for search engines is check after you write your post to see if you have keywords in the following:
- Headline
- First paragraph
- Sub-headers
- Anchor text for hyperlinks.
- Tags
And don’t worry a lot if you can’t cram them all in there. Treat that list as a helpful guideline, but don’t obsess or your prose will sound stilted and boring.
Using keywords simply means using the most basic words about your topic. So when you’re writing your copy or header, think of what words somebody might put into a search engine on the topic you’re writing about.
Say you’re writing about Wendy Writer’s cat, who has been flushing the toilet in the middle of the night, making her think the house is haunted by a long-dead tenant. Here are some possible headlines:
- “Hortense the Cat is a Genius.”
- “Wendy Writer Discovers the Truth About Mildred Baggins.”
- “Can Your Cat Learn to Flush a Toilet?”
So put yourself in the shoes of a person who might be interested in a story about a toilet-flushing cat. Are they more likely to type “cat flush toilet” into Google, or “Hortense,” “genius”, or “Mildred Baggins”?
Again, it turns out that empathy, rather than a gimmick, is the most powerful trick of all
by Anne R. Allen (@annerallen) March 19, 2023
What about you, scriveners? Have you adjusted your writing style to suit the rules of Web content? Do you still struggle with big paragraphs and complex sentences? Are you able to come up with enticing titles for guest blogposts and posts on your own site? Do these tips help?
BOOK OF THE WEEK
It’s HERE!! Catfishing in America, my comedy-mystery about romance scams is finally here. Nearly 4 years in the making. (I had to take off 2 years to nearly die. I seem to need drama in my life.) My new publisher, Thalia Press, has done a great job, and I’m pleased with the results. I hope you will be, too.
And if you are, I will be eternally grateful if you leave a review. Just a few words from you can make all the difference.
Book available in ebook and paperback at Amazon and paperback at Barnes and Noble
and your local bookstore can order it through Ingram
***
featured image: courtesy of Cookie the Pom on Unsplash
Excellent advice as usual. Thanks, Anne.
And yes, titles and subtitles matter a lot. And so does what I call, blog symmetry, which you talked about when you mentioned sentence length variety.
Thanks a lot.
Ingmar–“Blog symmetry” I love that! Exactly. The blogpost needs to look balanced on the page.
Anne—Thank you for a great, informative post. Very to the point & helpful.
Just have to remember that now I’m writing for spiders.* 😉
*didn’t know they can read
Ruth–Haha! Yup. Spiders are our overlords. We need to get Google’s attention.
Thanks, Anne! Sharing with my blogging posse and using your tips for my monthly newsletter. It’s challenging to keep content short, but I’m working on it.
Cat–Concise writing is where it’s at these days. Fiction writers like James Patterson have taken a lot from the copywriting book in grabbing the eye and conveying story in as few words as possible.
So….What do you do if you post your flash fiction (or any piece of fiction) in your blog? Using your web content rules seems like a difficult reach for fiction. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Thanks. Really learn a lot from your blog!
Ken–I generally don’t advise putting fiction on a blog because it doesn’t generate as much traffic, but if it’s working for you, that’s great and do continue. These are tips for writing nonfiction, but they can apply to fiction too. At least the concise writing and short paragraphs part. And white space. White space is your friend. James Patterson has perfected the use of white space in fiction.
Shorter paragraphs – that I can do!
I rarely use the heading font, but I do make my subheads much larger and bolder.
This had a ton of great tips, Anne – thanks!
Alex–the Google spiders don’t care if your subheading is bolded. But they do care if it’s formatted as a subheader, because that indicates content. Try formatting your subheaders in your blog program and see how much your posts move up the Google search page. It worked for me.
I read somewhere that using WordPress tags is actually bad for SEO. Do you know if that’s the case?
Liz–That’s a new one to me! It certainly isn’t the case for us. Our tags usually get us onto the Google SERP the same day we post.
Every time I read your blog, I come away with at least one thing new, Anne! And that’s pretty good, after ten years, every single week. Love the info about paragraphs. 30 years ago, I taught the grammar-perfect way. Now, I use Mike’s suggestions, without having really thought about it. Readers told me what they liked. Thanks for this post!
Melodie–Why thank you!! I’m glad you’re learning things here. Yeah, I think we’ve all gravitated toward shorter paragraphs these days because it’s what we see when we read, even though we may not do it consciously.
Timing is everything, and this article couldn’t have come at a better time for me as I begin my blogging journey as a new author. Now if I can just come up with the content…
Leslie–Best of luck in your blogging journey! As far as content, you can write about anything that will appeal to your target demographic. Stuff that will interest your potential readers. I have lots of advice on what to blog about in my book, the Author Blog, Easy Blogging for Busy Authors.
Excellent advice. Congrats on the book. That is a great cover and a great title. Glad you’re well and back to publishing.
Elizabeth–Many thanks! I love my new publisher and the cover design!
So, I saw the title of today’s blog earlier and thought, Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know all that. I read it anyway, and then went back into the blog I’m posting tomorrow (about reading your book reviews calmly!!!) and changed the entire first paragraph. I love your blogging/ web content advice, Anne. Have paid attention for years. Am getting better. I think!!
Joanna–Haha! I’m glad I helped you make the blogpost better.
I think that depends on what kind of readers you’re looking for with the posts. For years, I’ve followed all those rules and pretty much have not gotten much traction with my blog. After t discovered I was high Intellection and Input (Clifton Strengths), I shifted to deep thinking posts. Though there is white space, the content is not skimable Ino headers, maybe an occasional bullet point), It definitely goes against traditional web guidance.
And I’ve had more comments since I started doing it, and an increase in blog subscribers.
The first guideline is to be true to yourself.
Linda–Very interesting! I haven’t heard of anybody defying Google’s advice, but if it works for you and you don’t need Google to attract subscribers, write those meaty pieces. There’s always an exception to the rules.
Some comments on your web-writing tips:
1) Headers are THE hook to grab readers’ attention. An important aspect of that, too, is to address only ONE subject in the header, because you never know just where Google will cut it off. Here’s an example of a header I received last year in a Google Alert, which introduced two topics, with a silly result: “Camilla & Tony Blair join Order of the Garter & Covid Heroes …” (I doubt that Edward III had any idea how his Order would be adjusted – and become inclusive? – 700 years later.)
2) For me, there is such a thing as too much white space. A blog post or newsletter in which every paragraph is a single sentence, making the whole document a long, long, long scroll annoys me no end. It takes more time to scroll to the bottom than it would to read it, if it were condensed into reasonable paragraphs. Marketers and sales teams do this way too much. They might have a great product or service, but this method turns me right off. It sure doesn’t grab me or encourage me to read through to the bottom.
3) Opening with essential information is exactly what journalists are taught. Get the What, Who, When, Where, Why, and How in that first sentence or two, or that first paragraph. In the days of print news, if the story didn’t fit into the space, then the editor cut off the bottom of the story to make it fit.
4) Related to the first point about headers. Yes, make it brief, but distill the piece’s essence to provide that pithy title.
5) I didn’t know that headers and subheaders are formatted differently (as metadata, I suppose) from paragraph and normal text. Excellent!
6) Agreed. Who are you trying to reach? If readers want more depth about your topic, provide links to articles that address the more technical, philosophical, or scholarly aspects of it.
7) Gotta help those spiders to help us, don’t we? I haven’t used any “readability” programs or plug-ins yet to assess my material, but I ought to look into that. I’m pretty good at mixing it up with sentence length, but I’ll start looking at my own work more deliberately.
8) Nice play in this section using both a numbered list and a bullet-point list. The section becomes the example.
9) Good point on not using the words “here” or “this link.” Besides your reason, they can easily get lost in the rest of the text, if there’s little differentiation in the display of the text. I usually highlight the topic – a topic-related word or phrase – and hyperlink that. Sometimes I’ll make the hyperlink bold, too.
10) Another great point about how the best keywords are found when the writer thinks like the reader or web-searcher.
Sally–This is a whole blogpost. Thanks for all the tips! I agree there can be too much white space. We need to aim for “blog symmetry” which a commenter above pointed out. If every sentence is a paragraph, you don’t have that balance. And always keep your ideal audience in mind!
Are you using WordPress or another platfrom for your site?
Liz–This blog is on WordPress. I used to blog on Blogger. The formatting issues are about the same.
Great article. I found out through the hard way how to write good content for the web. Many thanks to the editors at Demand Studios, who helped me transition into this new medium. DS has long passed its peak, but in its heyday, I made decent money for my short articles. From my experience #6 and #7 are vital for writing for today’s internet. And don’t forget to use good visuals. (that includes youtube videos)
Hank–Sometimes we learn by doing. I did too. Visuals and videos do give you a Google bump. They’re more useful for some things than others. It’s invaluable to show a video on how to build a garden shed, but for how to write paragraphs, not so much. 🙂
Hank–Demand Studios wasn’t on my radar, but I know it used to be easier to make money for short articles. Videos are great for practical how-to articles. Not so much for writing articles like this. Watching somebody type isn’t all that informative. But we do need visuals. 🙂
Always learn something new from you, Anne! Anchor text for hyperlinks to maximize SEO is a new one to me. I’ve been using “link” or “click here” in bold but you explained why that can be overlooked by the spiders. Great tip.
Just bought Catfishing. Fun cover and, if you wrote it, I know it’s guaranteed to make me laugh. Congratulations!
Debbie–I sure hope you enjoy Catfishing! I had fun writing it.
Debbie–Thanks for buying Catfishing! I hope you find it fun. Anchor text hyperlinks do make a difference. See if you get more Google love with them!
I motion to adopt all ten points, Anne. And I’m sure I’ll have no problem finding folks to second it.
I’ve been regularly blogging for ten years, three of which I wrote full-time, professional web content for my daughter’s business. I once wrote a lengthy article on how writing web content will make you a much better overall writer and it’s out there on a few platforms – just some thoughts to share from what I’ve learned.
A couple comments from my experience. There’s a balance to white space as Sally says – a Goldilocks zone. Those continual 1-sentence paragraphs annoy me, and I’m sure they annoy others. 3-sentence paragraphs, on the average, work best and the sentence length shouldn’t normally exceed about 25 words.
As for article lengths – blog and web content – the sweet spot is 2200 to 2900 words. I read somewhere that a web piece should wrap up in the time a reader’s coffee starts to get cold. BTW, the 500-word bursts are history.
Be careful on keyword and keyphrase stuffing. The bots instantly recognize this attempted trick and will send the piece to SEO jail for it. Thankfully the bots are spiders and not snakes. I’m with Indiana Jones. I hate snakes.
And a Sunday evening bow to Ruth as well as you, Anne. I can tell from your voice that you’re feeling better, and that’s great. We want a grand old dame like you to stick around for a long, long time!.
Great stuff, as expected. Thanks once more.
Lots of good tips here. I make a conscious effort to write shorter paragraphs in my blog posts, mostly because I don’t like it as a reader. I follow a blog that often has great titles, but the content is one long info dump, Like ten scrolls of your mouse wheel nets you halfway down the page long.
Yoast SEO is my best friend! That plug-in rocks, but it’s also the bane of my blogging existence, tweaking till I get the green happy face. LOL
Sue–I have a love/hate relationship with those Yoast elves too. Getting that green face can be a slog when they say 3 sentences begin with the same word, but they don’t tell you what word. 🙂
Anne, thanks for all these great tips.
I leaned something new from this post – those Google spiders do not like links that say ‘here’ or ‘link.’ I’ve now started to change these links on my posts, so you’ll see no more ‘here’ and ‘link’ pingbacks on my blog.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve recommended bloggers use better titles for their posts. I always say to them, ‘what would you put in a search bar to find your post?’ I see so many boring, dull blog post titles that give me no incentive to click on the ‘read more’ link, so I skip on by to the next post.
Since using a free headline analyser for my blog post titles, I’ve seen an increase in visitors and lots more engagement on my blog.
Hugh–I’ve learned lots from your blog, so it’s cool to hear you’ve learned something from ours. I didn’t know there was a free headline analyzer! I’d better go find it! I just read a good article on a blog I follow that I wanted to tweet, but the title was one enigmatic word. The Tweet was meaningless. I ended up not posting it. People need to think of snagging a drive-by reader when they write titles.
Hi Anne, I use https://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer
If you headline (title) scores over 70, then it’s a good one. My new upcoming bloig post for this week gets a score of 84!
Hugh–Thanks much! Today’s headline only got a 71, but I’ll work on it!
Great tips on writing for the web! As someone who writes content for the internet, I can definitely attest to the importance of short paragraphs, headings, and bullet points to keep readers engaged. Thanks for sharing these helpful insights!
Ella–Thank you! It’s lovely to have my theories confirmed by a professional content writer.