How to write a web-page
Practical advice on writing content for websites, by Matthew Barnett of MJB Data, (preview version).
What is a web-page?
It doesn't seem like much of a question at first. In general terms a web-page can be described as words, pictures and other information that corresponds to a URL. It can consist of just about anything that can be digitised from a couple of words like 'under construction' to massive mixed-media presentations or full-length animated films.
What most people want to publish on-line is similar to what most people want to publish on paper - words and pictures: news, editorial, comment, advertising copy, opinion, and so on. The Internet was born as a text-based medium and text is still what it does best, in my opinion, particularly when it comes to disseminating and sharing information. The core activity of Google, the search engine that most people have heard of these days, is to suck up the Internet's text to match text-based searches to web pages. More often than not people who ask me about publishing on the Internet have being found on Google on their minds and it shouldn't come as too much of a shock if my Rule 1 is therefore 'start with text'. Forget menus and navigation, forget links and layout and simply start with a blank sheet and write something.
Different types of pages
There are different types of web-page that do different things. Some like home or index pages often use brief summary information to help visitors quickly assess whether they are on the right website and to guide them in the right direction. But before we look at summary pages I'd like to focus first on what is commonly called 'deep' content.
Anatomy of a 'deep' page
It's called 'deep' because you often have to wade through several layers of navigation before you find it. Essentially a 'deep' content page is a more fully-formed document - an article or essay or full product description. The page you are reading now is a good example. Rather than having loads of 'click here for more info on ...' links it features a big chunk of copy on a central theme, and would read just as well in any basic word-processor format. (An RTF version of this article is available to illustrate this point).
Well-formed copy is 90% or more of what you need for a well-formed web-page. Once you have the words the other 10% should be pretty easy.
1. TITLE
The title of a web-page is about the most important single element there is. Google and other search engines associate more importance to this than to just about anything else when it comes to assessing what a web-page is about. The page you are reading is essentially about how to write a web-page, hence the title which appears on the page as the main heading as well as in the less obvious HTML title tag which you can usually see in the top bar of the window of your web-browser. MJB Top Tip : always try to make your main page headings match your HTML title tags
2. DESCRIPTION
What description? The concept of page titles is relative straightforward to explain. However, descriptions are a bit different as they don't usually appear to anyone actually reading the web-page itself. Descriptions were originally intended for listings websites and directories to help people quickly find out what a page or site is about from a list. They're still used by some important human-edited websites and should ideally be objective, matter-of-fact brief summaries. In the case of this page the simplest description would be same as the sub-title 'Practical advice on writing content for websites, by Matthew Barnett of MJB Data' and this would also probably make automating descriptions using a CMS easier too. The ideal hand-written description might be something like 'An article by MJB Data's Mat Barnett offering tips and advice on writing web-pages including tips on copy-writing and advice on structural elements such as page-titles, meta tags and other HTML tags'. Notice the absence of subjective terms such as 'helpful' or 'useful' which would be rejected by human-edited directories like DMOZ and ZEAL.
3. KEYWORDS
Most authoritative sources of information on SEO and META tags have long reported the demise of the Keywords META tag and it's probably not worth spending much time compiling individual lists of important keywords for every page you publish online. However, it doesn't hurt to throw a few in as the worst that will happen is that they'll be ignored. Duplicating the content of the Title and Description tags is often a quick and easy option. If you're really keen you could train your CMS to strip out non-key words like 'and', 'the', 'at', 'a', 'etc', etc.
4. COPY/CONTENT
One of the reasons that the Internet is rather full of pages that not many people actually ever want to read is that a large proportion of website owners are concerned with getting visitors to a website rather than writing copy for them to read once they get there. If you start writing something with the aim of getting your page to appear on a search engine's first page of results for a certain set of keywords chances are you'll end up with something rather monotonous and repetitive. There's nothing wrong with editing your finished piece to favour words that are searched for more than others, but your primary goal should be to write copy that your target audience will want to read and then tweak it for SEO purposes when it's complete.
It's not much fun reading very long and text-heavy documents on screen. Big fat chunks of copy can easily put people off, as can seeing a scroll-bar that promises a huge page. For pages with over 2000 words you might want to consider producing an abridged version for screen with another version in plain-text or PDF format for people to print and read on paper.
General guidelines
Use heading tags for document and paragraph headings, (h1, h2 ... h6). Use bold and italic tags rather than style rules as these can used by search engines to spot emphasis.