I know exactly what you are thinking: "I don't know how to write content for the web..." but don't worry, we've put together a handy guide to walk you through the process. Here's what you need to know.

Create Useful, Detailed Information

Think about it - when you visit a website you are looking for useful and detailed information and that is exactly what you should provide for your visitors. Don't disappoint them by giving them one measly paragraph on your about page. Instead, inspire them with the history or your company, information about company management, your mission and your values. It's always better to over deliver rather than under deliver. If you are describing your services, don't just create a boring bulleted list. Instead, go into detail about each service and how it can benefit your customers.

Make It Easy to Understand

The last thing your visitors want to do is whip out a dictionary to look up every other word. Make sure you are using easy to understand language and don't just assume that your visitors know everything there is to know about your industry and products. Spell things out in plain English so someone who knows absolutely nothing about what you are talking about can "get it" quickly.

Use Keywords

One of the ways that people will find your website is through search engines such as Google and Bing. One thing you can do in order to help your site to show up in search engine results is to use keywords in your web copy. A keyword is a word or phrase that someone might type into a search engine to find your business or organization. An animal shelter from Connecticut, for instance, might include these keywords where relevant throughout their website text: Connecticut animal rescue, animal shelter, pet adoption, pet grooming, dog adoption, cat adoption, etc. You don't want to overdo it, in fact if you use the same word too often you could get penalized by the search engines.

Don't Just Recycle Your Old Content

Client's ask us all the time if we can pull the content off of their old website or brochure and just paste it into their new website. Recycling old content without at least looking it over is just a bad idea - trust me. When you are creating a new website you have a great opportunity to refresh your old content that may have become dated (such as product lines, pricing, locations, etc.). Obviously it's alright to reuse some of the content from your old website or brochure but you should check it over to make sure it's up to date, well written and doesn't contain any typing errors.

The Importance of Great Headings

You have some great tools at your disposal to make your content more visible to search engines and more interesting to your visitors. One of those tools is your Heading tags: Heading 1 (h1), Heading 2 (h2) and Heading 3 (h3). Each page you write content for should have one main heading which you should style with the Heading 1 tag. For search engine purposes you should only use Heading 1 once per page because it tells the search engines what that page is about. For other headings one your page you should use the Heading 2 and Heading 3 tags depending on the importance or level of each heading.

Put some thought into each heading that you create. It should be something that is catchy and that draws your readers in. If a page has a lot of text content, people will generally scan the headings of the page to find what they are looking for.

Submitting Your Content to Your Designer

Once your content is done, you'll want to get it to your designer in a way that is easy for them to use. A great way to do this is to type it up in a single Word document and email it to them. You should be sure to clearly state which page the content is for. Alternately, if it's easier for you to create a separate document for each page you can do that as well.