One thing great websites have in common is great web copy. Read on for writing tips and to learn about some of Silverscape’s practices that make your copywriting easier.

Start with the big picture – An important first step to writing copy for a website is developing the site architecture. This document is a mapped layout of the pages within your website. For each page, make notes on the content topics to be covered so you can determine the navigation paths you would like visitors to take. This will prepare you to write content in a way that guides your visitors to the most important areas of the site.

Organize your content writing efforts – Once you have an inventory of content that needs to be written, divvy this up among a small team of writers and set deadlines for deliverables along the way. Establishing a timeline with indicated deliverables for the initial draft and for each round of revisions thereafter will ensure a smooth writing process. At Silverscape, we use a formatted content deck to compile all of the content for a site in a single document. Each page in the document correlates to a page on the website to make content entry simple.

Keep sentences short and keyword-rich – Writing for the web is a delicate balance between writing in a way that is compelling for site visitors and writing in a way that search engines understand. Keep your sentences short and keyword-rich so that search engines can pick up on these. Google weights keywords in the order in which they appear on the page, so start with your most important keywords first and work your way down.

With meta data, honesty is the best policy – Search engines reference something called meta data to learn what is being said in the content on a website. Meta data is comprised of a list of keywords and a one to two sentence description of the content topic for each page on a website. Make sure you don’t insert keywords in the meta data unless those keywords are actually in the page content – search engines will penalize you for this as well! To learn more about search engine optimization, get in touch with us or read Matt Cutts’ blog on Google’s SEO Report.

Content Development is an ongoing project – Search engines reward you for adding fresh, relevant content on an ongoing basis. Once you’ve completed the content that will be on your website at the initial launch, it’s important to have someone in charge of ongoing copywriting. This will improve search engine optimization and will also encourage repeat visits from site visitors. At Silverscape, we build our websites on Common Goal WebManager content management system, which that allows our clients to easily edit/add new content and create new web pages. Give us a call to learn more about WebManager’s capabilities.