Writing Good Website Copy

Write what you know about. Or at least on topics that you are interested in and would enjoy researching.

Website copy, depending on the type of site you have falls into two general categories. The copy on the actual webpages, and articles that round out the content of the site.

While all copy really serves the same two purposes, one to give information and two to have search engines find your site, the style of each of the types of copy on your webpages should be different.

The main pages of your site, where you talk about your product or your company, are intended to be “salesy” and promotional – think of these pages more like the pages in a promotional brochure or a sales letter.

The articles on the other hand are expected to be less promotional and more news or editorial in nature, but featuring the keywords that can drive traffic to your site.

Does this all mean you need to be a professional writer to handle the copy on your site. No not necessarily, does it mean that the most successful sites do hire professional writers for their sites? Yes many do. But if that is just not in your budget here are a few tips for writing acceptable Web Copy.

• Composition. You do not have to be William Shakespeare but you do need to be grammatically correct. Understand the basics of sentence structure, and use proper grammar and punctuation. USE SPELL CHECK. Compositional Style is a little less important on Blogs, where the language is more conversational, but still proper grammar is expected, otherwise yo just look lazy.


• Keywords. Find the most appropriate keyword or keywords for your site and use them in the title of your page and at least 2 -3 times in each paragraph in the body of your Webpage text or Article. Create Hyperlinks from certain keywords or phrases that readers can click on – such as in this sample sentence: Researchers have found that more and more people are interested in herbal supplements.


• Credibility. Establish yourself as a credible expert in the field that you are writing about. If you have an MBA you are well qualified to write on Business topics, if you are any kind of Health Practioner, the same goes for health or fitness issues, a parent – on kids and so and so on. Also site other credible experts in your articles or web copy “…according to the New England Journal of Medicine” etc. DO not just quote something without attributing it. Attribution holds much more weight.


• Content. Content is king, while the text on your site is designed to use keywords to drive traffic “dummy articles” that are just space holders for repeated keywords one after another after another; or pre-formed templated pages will soon be seen through by the savvy web browser. You might catch a visitor once but only sites with real and useful content will have people coming back again and again, and hopefully take the action you desire.