An effective web editor must follow several golden rules to achieve its SEO and customer satisfaction goals. Here are ten golden rules that any web editor should follow. 10 golden rules to follow to be an effective web editor, achieve your SEO goals and satisfy your customers.
We do not write for the web as we write for a paper magazine. To be effective and hopefully have readers, as a web editor you must rely on a number of editorial rules specific to the web media.
Its purpose of the maneuver: inform, convince and improve its natural referencing. The main point on the golden rules of web writing.
1. Define your goals
The web editor writes articles on behalf of a client, often a company. If the primary goal of web writing is to position itself well on search engines, the web editor must also know his client very well.
Rule # 1: It is important to define the keywords that are most important to him depending on his activity and his target audience. Example: I want to sell essential oil products to the general public. Examples of keywords to privilege: essential oil, essential oils, buy essential oils, but also by type of product: lemon essential oil, sweet almond essential oil … (we sound ‘long tail’).
2. Meet the expectations of your target audience
You know your client and you have defined their target audience (or target audiences). It is now necessary to work your messages so that the surfer, often in a hurry, quickly finds the information he is looking for.
To meet the expectations of the user, it is important to provide quality information (well written, interesting, educational or perhaps funny, attractive …).
It’s the quality of content that matters, not the density of keywords. Great content is the one that corresponds to the interests of your user and answers his questions.
Avoid at all costs the advertising and self-promotion messages that are often annoying for the visitor and focus on writing good quality and engaging content.
3. Relying on a web editorial charter
If you have a lot of content and several contributing web editors, it’s fundamental to structure your information online and to define a style and tone for your web content. This is where the famous and indispensable web editorial charter comes in: this key reference document will follow you throughout your editorials and can be used by all contributors to the site.
4. Adopt a concise style, avoid jargon on the Web
Web writing has its own rules and adapts to the behavior of the user, especially the mobile user, even more in a hurry and less attentive. In addition to having a good editorial style, you need to be clear, concise and hard-hitting to hold the reader’s attention. Be sure to use a vocabulary that is simple and understandable by everyone, and to work on your titles that must be short and punchy.
5. Write for SEO
Let’s talk about SEO now: To make your website visible on search engines, you must write from an SEO perspective. Choose your keywords carefully, take care of your titles, insert good links and regularly produce quality content (It all comes back come back to it, the content!). For this, nothing like practice and concrete examples to optimize your content and test their impact on your SEO. Always for SEO, take the time to treat your home page, so that the user immediately finds the information that interests him. 30% of Internet users leave on the first page if it is not well designed.
6. Key information always at the beginning
This is one of the golden rules of web content writing: we put important content (keywords) at the beginning: in titles, at the beginning of articles, in the header … At the beginning of your paragraph or article, summarize the key information. This allows the user to instantly find the information he is looking for, and it’s good for referencing so combine business with pleasure! Do not forget that you write for your readers and that it is necessary to facilitate their navigation. In addition, these writing efforts for the web will improve your SEO positioning on search engines. It is a gymnastics of the mind and you have to train and train to write by ‘thinking’ SEO, then it becomes a habit and we forget this constraint to leave room for editorial style.
7. Writing short and airy texts with several levels of reading
the user reads diagonally and about 25% slower than on paper (on the shelves, there is a slower reading but in the order of 6% so the gap is narrowing). So write short and airy articles while prioritizing information and highlighting keywords. It is also very important to create internal links so that users (and search engines) can access different levels of information. In short, take care of the background as much as the form.
8. Customize your audience’s information
Address your visitors and offer content that interests them build loyalty. To do this, nothing better than to personalize your content based on the public you are targeting, even if to create several worlds in a website (ex: pros/individuals, businesses/employees). In some cases, it is possible and useful to create several subdomains. To address your target audiences, the golden rule of web writing is based on the law of proximity, already have the force of law in print journalism.
9. Animating your website yourself or through a specialized agency
Animation for your website is crucial, a site that lives is an active site. A site that does not move is a dead site. Propose a news section, regularly publish folders and involve your readers on a Facebook Page or a discussion Forum. Remember this: A regularly updated and shared on the social networking site put odds on his side to be better referenced on search engines. Social networks (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumbler…) must be included in your digital content strategy. Good content is content that is shared. Purpose of the operation: create a relationship with your target audiences.
10. Watch out for spelling mistakes!
With SMS and its new spelling laws, we see blooming spelling mistakes on the web. But an article that has several misspellings distracts the visitor from your message and makes you lose credibility. To avoid this, do not hesitate to re-read and have yourself re-read by a third party.
And if you need help writing your web content, do not hesitate to consult with a web authoring expert, who will contain these 10 rules at your fingertips.
