Copywriting Rules For Great Web Content

Copywriting is the art of creating clear nonfiction prose for specific business and communications purposes - like advertising, sales copy, press releases, and similar items. Much of the writing you'll find online is simply copywriting that has been adapted to the special needs of the Internet.

Web copywriting follow certain guidelines:

1. Have a keyword phrase in mind. Without knowing exactly what you want the search engines to target, you don't even have a plan. Everything else hinges upon this critical phrase.

2. Write a fantastic title. Your title should have your keyword phrase in the beginning, and it should be short, no more than six to eight words. It should both clearly describe your article and also be original and catchy.

3. You will then want to write a short, great description for your description metatag. The description is what the search engine lists in the small paragraph accompanying the link and title. A clear, concise description is necessary to get a prospective visitor to click, so you really need to consider carefully and write clearly. Your metatag description should contain your keyword phrase as close to the beginning as you can possibly manage, and keep it short like 20 words or less or about two text lines. This is the introduction of your article.

4. Clarity in writing is necessary. Short paragraphs with clear, concise sentences is vital for a good web presentation. Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru, stated a long time ago that looking at computer screens can be maintained by people for short periods of time. It is not like reading a book. He suggested that paragraphs be kept to about three or four sentences and that sentences be simple in structure. Bullet lists are very popular on the web.

If you find that you are writing long paragraphs, stop and make them shorter. The same thing applies to sentences.

People want facts. Don't be artsy or write a bunch of fluff. Get to the point, and omit needless words.

S&W, available at Bartleby.com provides an excellent reference for this. Read it - it's free and it will present the point clearly and quickly.

6. Standard rules of spelling, punctuation and grammar apply. Avoid kittespeak, hacker rap or texting shorthand except to punctuate a point and then only very rarely. Proofread everything and get a good spellchecker to minimize obvious typos.

7. Use the journalistic inverted pyramid structure. People do not read to the end online. They read the beginning and skim the rest. (The skimming habit, by the way, is why Nielsen recommends lots of bullets and numbers - very skimmable.) If you start with the most important chunk and work downward to the least important details, you'll be able to communicate the core of your work to your reader.

8. For sales copy, start with a compelling question. Because online readers don't read from beginning to end, you absolutely must capture their attention at the beginning. A great trick used by fiction writers is to start with a question the reader desperately wants answered, then don't answer it til the end. The trick is keeping the reader moving through your text in order to get to that answer. If you figure out how to do this well, you can break every other rule above whenever you want.

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