Jan 08 2009
What Makes a Good Web Copy?
The thing about the internet is that it offers a wealth of information which shortens a user’s attention span for a particular piece of content. A web user will only allot a few minutes or even less than a minute of his time scanning your material, so you want to produce a web copy that will allow you to tell him everything that he needs to know in such a small amount of time.
Web reading pattern
Readers on the internet are generally skimmers. The dominant reading pattern follows the letter F.
A recent eye-tracking study observed how users view thousands of pages on the web. It found that reading behavior is fairly similar across different sites. Regardless of the type of information that you provide, a user will typically view it in the same way he would view a totally different type of material on the same medium.
First, a user goes through the upper part of the web copy horizontally. This being the case, you want to make sure that the essential information that you want your visitor to know is provided on that portion. If this isn’t possible, you will want to create an engaging introduction or a compelling headline that will invite the user to read on. At this point, he will move down the page and read in a second horizontal movement but because his attention span is relatively short, he will only skim a shorter area compared to the first horizontal movement.
Afterwards, the user goes to the left side of the page in a vertical movement. In some cases, the movement is slower as the user tries to go over what else the page can offer or any other links that he can browse into.
Crafting your online material
Another essential part of creating a good online material is understanding how search engines see your pages. This is a totally different from the human perspective. For one, search engines go over your page to determine its relevance. For this, they generally make use of word relationship technologies such as LSI (latent semantic indexing). “This allows a search engine to determine what a page is about outside of specifically matching search query text.”
In this method, the document is scanned as a whole aside from going over such concepts as keyword selection and density. According to the definition provided by SEO Book, “LSI considers documents that have many words in common to be semantically close, and ones with few words in common to be semantically distant.” This may not necessarily cover the meaning of the words but rather the position of the words relative to other documents of the same type.
Suffice to say, proper word play is important in creating a good web copy. You want to make sure that the terms that you use are interrelated and that you remain consistent all throughout your website. Remember that you are creating your online material for two main types of readers: the search engines and your human visitors.
Here in Blackwood Productions, we can provide you with content that does not only make your website rank, but also engages your readers. Know more about our content writing and SEO services by exploring this website.
