Writing for the web is different from writing essays or from writing books. The content that is read online needs to be easy for people to read from a screen.
This means that small writing and long paragraphs should be avoided. You also need to work under the assumption that your reader has a very short attention span.
1) Learn to write very quickly
Web content is worth a lot of money to the people who host the content, but is not very valuable from the writer’s point of view.
This means that you need to learn how to write web content very quickly. Even if you are going to host the content yourself, you need to write it quickly because you are going to need a lot of it. You are also going to need it very regularly, so if you do not learn how to write quickly, you are going to spend all of your time writing.
2) Make your article titles very appealing
The titles of your web content are the things that attract the most traffic.
They need to be both descriptive and appealing. Giving your titles a vague title or a non-descriptive title will not encourage people to read it. People are not going to read your content for the sake of reading; they need a direct motivation. Your title can give them their motivation.
3) Do not fluff out your text
Fluffing out text is when you add lots of nonsensical text, or make the sentences more “wordy” with no good reason. Lots of people do this in order to increase the word count, but it just makes your content hard to read and will annoy your viewers.
Instead, if you need to increase the word count, research into more things you can add and research new angles you can add in. This will make your text more interesting to read, and you will not feel the need to fluff out the text.
4) Amend your keywords after the fact
Never write articles or blog posts with a mind to putting keywords into them, because you will have to insert them artificially, and the sentence structure and readability will suffer. Instead, once you are finished, have a look to see if the keywords have already appeared organically. If they have not, then change a few of the existing sentences so that they may hold the keywords without affecting the sentence structure or readability.
5) Keep to the rules of grammar and spelling
You do not need to stick to it like an Ivy League professor, just make sure it is not bad. If it is bad, the search engines may punish your website under their quality guideline rules.
6) Make your content unique
Do not spin content and do not rewrite other articles. You need to keep your content original so that the search engines do not punish your website or blog in any way. Original content is also more interesting to read too.
7) Keep your anchor text relevant to the content and linked site
When people are writing web content, they often do it in order to install a link. The link has anchor text, and if you know the text in advance, you need to write the article so that it agrees with the anchor text.
There is no point in putting a link to a shoe-selling website into an article about bubble bath.
8) Make your paragraphs shorter
White space is a big factor in making your content easier to read. Shorter paragraphs will create more white space, which will make it easier for the user to read.
This does not mean your paragraphs need to be shortened. You can write your paragraphs and then break them up after you have finished. You may have to add a few transitional sentences, but that should be no hardship.
9) Use headers to make reading a little easier
Headers tell people what the next paragraph is all about. You have to assume the people are skim reading, but if your header is appealing then they may stop skim reading and actually read a paragraph. Headers are also a good way of telling people what your content is about.
People will look at the title, and if they are mildly interested, then the next thing they read will be the headers. If the headers are also appealing, the viewer may become a reader.
10) Write your content for the target audience
You need to figure out what demographic you are writing for, and then create content that will appeal to them as a target group. If you are writing for a certain demographic, then your content must be appealing for them, and readable by them. For example, writing for 12-year-old children will require a different vocabulary and syntax than writing for a group of 50 year olds.