Web design today is content-driven and most business websites strive to have content that attracts readers while still maintaining recognition by search engines. People use the internet for a variety of reasons and included in these is the desire to buy a product or service. By the same token, they are quickly turned off to a website where the web content does not give them the product information they need. Here are some tips for you the web designer for writing, purchasing, or editing web content that not only fits your web design but also integrates with the marketing plan of your web design client’s business.

Web content should first be written to solve a problem. People choose to buy a product because they believe it will give them a solution to their problem. For example, people visit health and nutrition websites because they want to get in shape but don’t know where to start. They may not be looking for a particular vitamin or health supplement per se but wanting to know what is the first step to improving their fitness. Your web content should consist of helpful articles relating to fitness and health improvement that will be of interest to them. Remember that the focus is on the visitors and not your web design client.

Before writing your content, determine what likely keywords and key phrases a person would use to find a website. One way to do this is by using Google Adwords to get statistics of search terms entered by users that are related to a search term you want to use. Another similar tool is the Free Keyword Tool from Wordtracker. The idea is to use key phrases or keywords in your web content that reflect commonly-used keywords in the major search engines like Google. By using these key phrases and keywords, the search engine crawlers can properly read the website and classify it accordingly in their index. Don’t saturate an article with keywords and key phrases because it will affect the flow of words making the article difficult to read. Many recommend no more that 1 to 2 percent keyword density.

Web content should be written so the reader can skim. Few people have the time to read everything on a web page in detail. Within a few seconds of looking at a website, the visitor should be able to figure out what it is about and if it provides a solution to his or her problem. One way this is accomplished is by keeping paragraph lengths short or using lists. Paragraphs should stay on the ideas of their topic sentences. The topic sentence is usually the first sentence of a paragraph and the remaining sentences develop the first. Some recommend only two or three sentences per paragraph but four or five are acceptable as long as the paragraph topic is fully explained. A good rule of thumb to follow is if the paragraph looks too long, try to see if it can be split up into two topics.