Writing For The Web (with notes on slides)

Writing for the web

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Six things to think about when writing for the web

Make it easy to find - use keywords (searchable)

Short, specific headline (reason to click)

First paragraph tells the story (reason to read)

Make it engaging (multimedia, interactive, keep audience longer)

Make it easy to scan (quick and easy to read)

Include links to related material (context, extra value)

1. Make it easy to find - use keywords

First, make it easy to find. Use keywords in your story, headline and ‘abstract’.

Keywords are the words people type into a search engine to find what they’re looking for.

You might type in the keywords ‘Dunedin World Cup’ to find out whether Dunedin will be hosting any World Cup games.

Sure enough, first up in the Google results is an Otago Daily Times story discussing the World Cup rugby matches that Dunedin will host.

And you can click through to read the story. That’s one way people find news stories – by typing keywords into a search engine.

Another way to find stories is via the news feeds that feature on, say, your Yahoo Xtra homepage….

… or Google news page.

You might come across a news story on Twitter...

... or Facebook.

You can also go directly to a news website’s homepage…

… and browse for news there.

What percentage of traffic to a news story comes via the website’s homepage?

100%

75%

50%

25%

What percentage of traffic to a news story comes via the website’s homepage?

100%

75%

50% (give or take)

25%

Roughly half of the visitors to any given news story come to that story via a search engine. (That’s not an exact figure but it gives an idea of how powerful search can be in driving visitors to your website.)

That means search is important for news websites and for journalists.

“ It’s about ensuring that your content is found by the millions of people who use search engines as a filter for news (Google News, Yahoo News).

“ These people are essentially asking a computer to tell them the news.”

Shane Richmond, communities editor, telegraph.co.uk

“ If you want your story to be read, you’d better make sure the computer knows what you’re writing about.

“ To do that you need to ensure your article contains certain keywords.”

Shane Richmond, communities editor, telegraph.co.uk

Make it easy to find - use keywords

… in the headline

… in the intro/first paragraph/abstract

… in the text

2. Short, specific headline

Short, specific, tells the story

Include keywords

Include place names

Be wary of puns, metaphors and wordplay

Needs to make sense on its own

Headlines need to make people want to read more - a reason to click

On the left is the front page of the New York Times announcing the outcome of the 2009 US presidential election. On the right is the same story on nytimes.com. The web headline includes ‘elected’ and ‘president’ – keywords.

Shannon found alive near home

Gunfire as Tibet rallies turn violent

Teen shot dead – police

Horse sense on frontiers

Supreme court to rule on right to carry guns

Which of these headlines is least likely to be clicked on?

Horse Sense on Frontiers makes sense here when you have the other headline, picture and caption to help. But on its own doesn’t make sense. Web headlines need to make sense on their own – give people a reason to click.

3. First paragraph (intro/abstract) tells the story

This is about giving people a reason to read further. Explaining the story in the first paragraph helps the reader decide whether they want to read on.

In addition, on smaller news websites the first paragraph will be automatically picked out…

… and used as an ’abstract’ on the homepage. So the first paragraph, or intro, needs to sell the story.

That’s not always the case, though. On bigger news sites, the intro is sometimes rewritten to fit the homepage.

Here, nytimes.com has rewritten the story’s intro to fit a particular space on the homepage.

4. Make it engaging (multimedia, interactive)

This is about giving the reader more to do than just read the text – and hopefully keeping them on your website longer.

If you scroll down on the nytimes.com Obama story…

… you see that they’ve included a video of Obama’s victory speech, another of John McCain’s concession speech, an interactive map of the US giving voting results for each state, links to related stories….

… and links to blogs and readers’ comments on the story. There’s a lot more there for readers to engage with than just the story itself

5. Make it easy to scan (quick read)

Reading online is a different experience to reading print. It’s helpful to make pages as clear and easy to read as possible.

Clarity is created here, for example, by putting the headline, byline etc in clear areas and using white space to prevent clutter. There is a gap between each paragraph to make the text stand out and a sans-serif typeface is used, which some studies have shown to be easier to read online than serif type.

6. Include links to related material

Including links to material cited in the story and to contextual information can be a useful service to readers… and lead them to other parts of your website.

In this guardian.co.uk story they’ve added links to other science stories, other World news stories, a podcast on a similar topic and stories about dinosaurs.

In the nytimes.com Obama story they’ve added links to other stories written about the election and the challenges facing the Obama administration.