If you’ve done any sort of research on writing for the web, you might think you know what this article’s going to say. Keep reading anyway … I’ll buy a digital donut for anyone that can guess all four of the points before they read them! You probably already know about tactics like keeping your sentences short and paragraphs even shorter, making sure your content is relevant and contains real, useful information, and utilizing bullet points and internal sub-headings to make content easier to mentally digest. Today we are looking at 4 aspects of writing for the web that are radically different, even fundamentally different, from the idea of writing for print publication.

New idea #1: Keyword inclusion
Print authors don’t need to worry so much about having their book found via keywords – the only place that occurs is a library. Magazine authors and newspaper journalists don’t need to worry about this at all. However, when you’re writing for the web you cannot ignore the keywords for your page. You shouldn’t use them unnaturally – but be aware of places where you can easily substitute a keyword for a related word, without the text sounding forced and contorted. Keywords help your SEO.

New Idea #2: Writing for selfish readers
On the web, users can cherry-pick information to a higher degree than ever before. If your site tries to push its own agenda too overtly, or if it is too focused on itself, readers will click off and look for something more relevant to them.

In print, the opposite is true. People read from the start to the end of a magazine article or newspaper section … and they definitely read books from start to finish! They want the author to construct their experience, and they have quite a bit of patience with the time it might take to do so.

New Idea #3: Inclusion of hyperlinks
Hyperlinks are the very fabric of the web … not only are they the way that many of us get around the web, they also form one of the central building blocks for how search engines deliver content. Links are the way that everybody gets to any page they see on the web, and your content will naturally include them. The trick with writing hyperlinks is not to acknowledge the link (it disturbs the flow of your narrative), place it in the first instance of the relevant term, and never, ever use the words ‘Click here for such and such’!

New Idea #4: Embrace the sentence fragment
When you click through to a Google Books result for a search term, you most likely notice the difference in narrative style between the book, and the web pages you are used to viewing, immediately. Printed narratives always use complete sentences; in the more informal setting of the web full sentences are actually UNdesirable. Fragments help you pull keywords to the start of a sentence and therefore make it more obvious to a search engine what the page is about. Since readers on the web only process around 20% of words on a page, fragments are actually preferable.

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