All About: Content Development

How to Develop content Tips

While the Internet began with a U.S. Government research project in the late 1950s, the web in its present form did not appear on the Internet until after Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at the European laboratory (CERN) proposed the concept of linking documents with hypertext. But it was not until Mosaic, the forerunner of the famous Netscape Navigator, appeared did the Internet become more than a file serving system.

The use of hypertext, hyperlinks and a page-based model of sharing information, introduced with Mosaic and later Netscape, helped to define web content, and the formation of websites. Largely, today we categorize websites as being a particular type of website according to the content a website contains.

Writing for a web audience is different that writing for a print audience. The copy must state what the customer is looking for quickly. The content should immediately state what the customer is getting by reading your material.

How to develop content

In his book, Killer Web Content, Gerry McGovern says that the secret to writing for the web is "to be found in the concept of carewords. Theres something in them that has explosive potential, something that gets to the essence of modern human behavior. As Web readers, we are hunter-gatherers once again only this time, instead of scanning the horizon for prey, we scan pages for carewords. When we see these words, we click, we act. And that is what the Web is all about: tasks and actions."

Think about it--when you initially go to the web, you're ultimately looking for something that is new and fresh--and grabs your attention. McGovern says that "What do most people care about when flying today? Low fares or free coffee? Youd probably say low fares. When people go to a search engine, are they more likely to type low fares or cheap flights? Suppose I told you that one of these careword phrases is 400 times more likely to be typed into a search engine than the other. Wouldnt it be important for you to know that if you were working as a marketer for an airline?"

Back To Top

Tips

  • Use Google to your advantage. Do a search on the top that you are writing about--create your piece using the most popular words so that your article gets placed high in search results.
  • Keywords. You've worked hard on these keywords; make them stand out (bold, different font,headlines, etc.)
  • Clear titles. Make it painfully clear what you are going to talk about. It's fun to be clever and cute, but it can backfire on you. Search engine spiders just aren't attuned to puns, cliches, or out of the ordinary slang terms.
  • Be short and sweet.This is high school English. Don't cram as many ideas as possible into one paragraph; rather, use that paragraph to focus on only one idea.
  • Sales language. Do you enjoy wading through a bunch of sales language to get to the meat of a story? Well, neither will your readers. Don't inflate your writing with a lot of hot air; keep it down to earth.

Back To Top