by Michy Lynn

Created on: September 22, 2007   Last Updated: September 01, 2011

Writing for websites is very different than writing for print publications, and to be an effective writer for web content, you need to know the differences and learn to embrace them. If the only writing you have ever done was for print publications or your own blog, learning to write web copy and web content means you almost have to learn the rules of writing all over again.

This article is going to explore some of the differences between web copy and content and the way you probably learned to write when you were in school. Don't worry, you don't have to throw out everything you learned about writing in order to be an effective web writer, because things like grammar and punctuation are still the same, or at least similar, but you do need to learn what makes good web copy.

Attention!

According to various internet research studies, you have about 3-5 seconds to catch your reader's attention, and about 12 seconds of writing to keep it. The average computer user will not spend more than 7-12 minutes maximum on your website or your article, so you have a very small window in which to grab the reader's attention, focus that attention on your article, and then keep that attention to the end.

We were taught in school to use a thesis paragraph and sentence for our introduction to our writing, but with web content and web copy, this may not necessarily be the best way to go. Of course, you do want to tell the reader what your article is about, but the first part of your article really needs to be something that will grab the reader's attention in those first 3-5 seconds and make them read further.

Therefore, when writing web copy, you want to move your actual thesis sentence or paragraph down the page to about the second or third paragraph and save your introduction for something that will really hook your reader.

After that, you want to keep the article short. If you don't feel a short article will convey all the information you need to the reader, then consider writing a series of articles, or simply write more than one article on the topic at hand and have different points in each article. If the article cannot be read through in less than 7 minutes (and preferably less than 5), then you need to break it up into more than one article.

Keywords and Search Engine Optimization

When we were taught to write in school, repetition was a bad thing. We were told to find new and creative ways to say the same thing differently. Instead of repeating the same phrases over and

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