Writing Web Content 101
Make your web site work for you with great, concise content – get the traffic you need, keep people on your site longer, and lead them directly to the action you want them to take – whether it is buying your product, attending your event, reading your writing, or washing your dog.
Write an Effective Home Page
Your home page is THE most important page of your site. Google will look at it first and consider it the most important page of your site. So will your visitors.
Many web site owners like to have just a graphic or Flash file on their home page – a logo, photo, moving images, etc. While this may be visually appealing, it is actually preventing your home page from doing its job. Don’t let your home page be a lazy-loo.
Ideally, in addition to eye-catching graphics or photos, your home page should have real, descriptive, keyword-rich text on it—actual text, not as part of a graphic. It should say what your site is about and what problem your product or service can solve for the visitor. If there are important keywords phrases for your product, make sure those are prominent in the text on the home page. Are there certain phrases that you think people will Google to find you? Make sure that text is on your page, as close to the top as possible.
But keep it natural. We have all visited web sites that look like they were written by a robot, spitting out keyword phrases like that telemarketer who insists on interrupting your dinner. Your visitors will catch on to this and think your site is not legitimate. Keep the language smooth and conversational, and make sure you deliver the most important points at the top of your page.
Use Headings for Great SEO
Headings are larger, bolder lines of text before a paragraph, like “Using Headings for Great SEO” above. People will visually scan a page for a second or two before they decide if it is worth reading. If the text is broken up with headings, the reader can see immediately if what they need is there, and may be enticed to read things they were not even looking for. Making those headings interesting and descriptive will lure people into reading instead of clicking away.
Headings are great for search engines. Google and other search sites will look for headings for the same reason your visitors will—to get a quick idea of what the page is about and what it has to offer. It will consider headings more important that regular text, so make the headings descriptive. Someone who sells exotic pet training should perhaps have a heading that says “Train your Tortoise to Tap Dance” instead of “What We Do”
Make your Content Easy to Scan and Digest
Again, long blocks of text are not going to entice someone to read the page.
Some great ways to make your content easier to swallow:
- Tell people immediately what you want them to get from the page. If all they read is the first paragraph, at least it should be an informative one that sums things up.
- Keep sentences and paragraphs short. Eliminate any language or content that is not 100% necessary.
- Break the content up into paragraphs that each cover one topic only and get straight to the point.
- Use lists (like this one)—they are easy to scan and they stand out from other paragraphs. People are suckers for a list—have you scanned the magazine covers at the checkout lately? “Ten Ways to Tone Your Tushie” will work every time.
- Use bold and italics (never underline unless it is a link) to focus people on important keywords.
- Don’t try to say too much. If a page is too long, people will just assume it is a snooze.
Use Descriptive Links
Use links in your text to lead people to other parts of your site where they can get more specific, detailed information on a topic. This makes it easier to lead your visitors where you want them to go, and keeps them engaged on your site.
Make these links descriptive: instead of saying “Read More!” try “Click here to learn how you can potty train your parakeet!” This helps the reader who is just scanning the text, and these descriptive links tell Google what kind of content that link will lead to.
Get Some Action!
No, not THAT kind, silly.
You should have a clearly defined goal for your web site, and there is an action your visitors can take to help you reach it. It is imperative that you are clear when you are writing your content that your goal is always being served and that your visitor is constantly given the opportunity to take action.
If you are selling a product, for example, your goal is to sell tons of it. You want your site visitors to take the action of buying. Make sure you have prominent text links throughout the site to “Click here to buy Amazing Gro today!” as well as a prominent Buy Now! graphic that repeats through the site. When someone has that impulse to buy, you don’t want them to spend precious minutes searching for how to take action. You are just giving them more time to change their mind and buy Stupendo-Grow (i.e., your competitor and arch-nemesis) instead.
Make It Interesting
People get so worried about offending anyone that they frequently make their web content dead boring. Don’t be afraid to be unique and use your own personal voice! If your personal voice is that of a drunken sailor, well, perhaps you should invent a more appealing voice, but otherwise, don’t hide behind boring technical terms and dry content. Let your passion for your product or service shine through. Just be careful to avoid tons of exclamation marks!! They can make you seem smarmy and insincere!!!!
Don’t forget to spell-check, and have a trusted friend with strong editing skills read everything over. Don’t choose your mother who thinks everything you do is perfect. Choose the snarky-but-smart friend who will tell you to your face if your content is a big yawn.
Ready to start? Shoot me an email and lets start on the road to building your dream web site!
Backup Backup Backup!
I have become a little obsessed lately with backing up my stuff. If something were to happen to my computer (in a house with 2 kids and 2 pets and 2 ill-coordinated adults, it is always a possibility) I need to be double and triple sure that I can get all of my stuff back.
How about you? How are you backing up your computer? If you aren’t, let me persuade you to start today. Whether your computer contains work files, family photos, music, or that novel-in-progress, don’t run the risk of losing it all to theft, hard drive fail, or accident. We lost a whole laptop when a few drops of coke spilled on the keyboard – it is that easy to lose it all.
Online Backup
There are several really affordable services which will backup your computer to an offsite server – the first backup can be time consuming, but after that, it will simply backup your computer at scheduled intervals (mine happens every night while I sleep) with no intervention from you. This is great even if all you did was accidentally delete some files – you can usually restore them within an hour- less if you have fewer files on your backup. Having the backup offsite means that no matter where you are or what happens, your files are somewhere safe and waiting for you.
I personally use Mozy – for personal use you get unlimited file storage for only $4.95 per month or $55 per year- a STEAL for the peace of mind it provides.They also offer a free version for up to 2GB – great if you don’t have as much data to back up. I have been using Mozy for years now, and several times it has saved my hide.
I have also heard good things about Carbonite – also $55 per year. If you google, there are a lot of these services cropping up now. I personally prefer to stick with one that has been around for a while – I don’t want my files to all disappear when a new company goes out of business.
External Backup
I recently took my backup plan a step further and purchased an external hard drive. Note that I do not recommend an external drive as your only backup method. Why? Because an external can get stolen just as easily as your laptop, and external drives do have a bad habit of going bad. But it can be a great second line of defense if you buy carefully and use them appropriately.
I got a lot of really great advice before my purchase, and I wanted to pass that on to you. I did not know a thing about how to buy an external hard drive, and without the help, I would have spent more money for a less desirable outcome.
Don’t buy a prepackaged external drive and case.
At Best Buy and other electronics stores, most of what you will find are external drives that come already in a case that allows the drive to be hooked up to your computer. The problem is, the drives they use for these prepackaged devices are usually of low quality and have very short warranty periods. You can pretty much expect the drive to die within a year or 2.
Instead, buy the external drive and case separately. For very little difference in price you can get a much more robust hard drive. Buy the best external drive you can afford. The Western Digital Caviar series is what was consistently recommended to me, specifically the Caviar Black. It has 1T (that’s a luxurious TERABYTE people) of space, runs very quietly, and does not seem to get too overheated. It also has a 5-year warranty. The Samsung RAID drives were also highly recommended. Whatever you buy, make sure you get something with a SATA interface and a 5-year warranty. It does not cost much more to go from a moderately crappy drive to a really good one.
Then get an external enclosure for the drive. You need this to allow the hard drive to connect to and communicate with your computer. You need one that supports 3.5″ SATA hard drives, and will support the amount of storage that your hard drive will hold. You can find ones that will connect via USB or Firewire. I read a lot of bad reviews about connecting with Firewire (even though it should technically be faster) so I went with USB 2 and have been really happy. And don’t stress about how hard it will be to put it all together – most external enclosures require nothing more than a screwdriver. Some require no tools at all. I got one that you can’t even really call an enclosure – I just pop the external in when I need it, and push a button to pop it out when I don’t need it – it is sort of like a toaster. 
You will definitely get what you pay for, so while you can get an external enclosure for as little as $10, I found that the ones that really met my needs were more in the $40-$60 range. Read reviews for things like noise, overheating, speed, and durability.
I got everything I needed from http://www.newegg.com and found they had a really good selection at great prices, but you might be able to beat them by shopping around.
I use my external as a backup for files that I might need to recover quickly, and as storage – my laptop was getting seriously full and I needed some extra space. But because even with the 5 year warranty, I don’t trust an external drive to last, I have Mozy back up the external drive every night as well.
Eventually I would actually like to add a few more external drives to my arsenal and periodically swap them out so that I have duplicate backups, no one device is getting too much wear and tear, and I am even less likely to lose those files I might need quickly.
Web Site Backup
This is all well and good for your computer, but what about your web site? Unless you have a server in your house that you are using to host your site (you probably don’t), then your web site is on the server of a hosting company like GoDaddy, BlueHost, HostGator, etc. Most of the big hosting companies are pretty reliable, but I have heard enough horror stories of servers going down and sites being completely lost that I highly recommend having your own regular backup plan in place for your web site.
A good hosting company will have a way to back up your entire site. In Bluehost, Hostmonster, and Hostgator, you can just go to your Control Panel, scroll down to Files, and click on Backups. Click one the “Download or Generate a Full Web Site Backup” button and a backup of your entire site and any MySQL databases used by it will be generated. I recommend putting on your calendar to do this kind of backup regularly – monthly, or even weekly if you post to your self-hosted blog often or frequently make changes to your site. Do a backup every time you make a lot of changes to your site, and you won’t be caught in a pickle if the worst happens.
If you are not sure whether or not your particular hosting company allows you to do backups or how to do it – just give them a call and they should walk you through it. If they don’t give you that ability or won’t help you – time to look into making a switch to a new host.
If you know how to connect to your site via ftp, you can download all of the files on the server to your computer. However, this will not backup any databases your site may use, if, for example, your web site is in WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.
If you have a self-hosted WordPress site (i.e., it is at your domain name, not at a wordpress.com domain) you can install a handy plugin called WordPress Database Backup. You can set it to backup your database automatically every hour, day, week, or month and send the backup straight to your email. This will only backup your database however – and databases DO get corrupted so this is always a good idea – but in order to protect the files on your server, you really need to be doing a complete backup regularly.
Do it today!
I hope this helps you make a plan TODAY to backup your computer and your web site. We always tend think “It will never happen to me.” But the reality is, it happens to almost everyone eventually. Computers get stolen, hard drives get damaged, web sites go down. You can make sure the event is merely an annoyance rather than a total disaster by having a backup plan and putting it in action.