I wrote this for my clients so that I don’t have to work as extensively with them to get their site optimized, and I thought it might benefit your clients as well.
Writing for the internet is different from writing for magazines or newspapers. At its core, it means that your audience is completely different than you think it is. Like in a magazine, a snazzy title is a good start to getting readers, and all-around good content is a way to get readers to stick with your piece, but writing for the internet is so much more than that. Below are 3 simple principles to remember while writing for the internet. They are designed to help you drive traffic to your site with little to no effort.
1) Pick a Snazzy Title
Like for a table of contents, picking a title that is interesting, might be the biggest factor in driving traffic to your website. Vice versa, it also has potential to be one of the reasons no one comes to your site. Pick relevant titles that will make people want to click on your title when they search on Google.
2) Pronouns and why they suck
Writing for the internet means that your audience is more than you think. For the first time ever, when you write a story about how to make a bundt cake, suddenly it ain’t just people reading your material. Writing for the internet means that while some of your audience are Meat & Potatoes kind of men and women, a large contingent of them are robots. These robots read your material, mathematically determine what is interesting, ad then return the results to Google who subsequently displays the material. One of the key factors in this math that determines how interesting your article is, factors in something called keyword density. Basically when writing for the internet, your keyword needs to appear more often than you think it does. What that involves is using less pronouns. As you may have noticed, this article is optimized for the phrase “writing for the internet”.
3) Use Pictures
Pictures are a great way to get your numbers up (so long as you optimize them correctly). Images provide a chance to increase your keyword density, but they also provide another source of traffic. Google is one facet of how people search. Believe it or not, while a lot of people search for content, others search for images. What that means is that a well-optimized image that appears at the top of its content block, will drive you a bunch of traffic, sort of like an article that is at the top of its keyword results.
I know that for a lot of people, these are pretty basic, but for those of you who are new to writing for the internet, I think that these are really simple things to remember if you want to drive traffic to your site.
