Today, the internet is an overcrowded space and can be compared to a lot of stars in the sky or unlimited sand particles on the beach. As per the internet live statistics, there are 1.9 billion plus websites in existence, 3.5 billion plus Google searches on a daily basis, and roughly 350,000 tweets sent every minute. In this kind of competition, capturing the readers’ interest can be the biggest challenge you can be facing.

Chartbeat conducted a research that opened up an ugly fact that 55 percent of the visitors spent less than or 15 seconds on a webpage. Good website content is the key to defeat these statistics. Well-written content that’s optimized for the web allows your webpage to top the search results and can hold readers’ attention.

Whether your content appears on the web or in print or carved on a wall there are some writing rules that you need to know. Follow these 9 golden rules to make sure whatever you write gets the attention it deserves.

1. Do your KYC research: Before you put pen to paper or finger to keyboard you need to study who are you trying to reach? I.e. your customers/audience/readers’. These are some questions which need answers before you start drafting your content. Who is my target audience? Who are my target audience influencers? How are they going to reach my website?. Once these parameters are defined you need to dig deep and try to answer questions like, What topics would they like to read about? What questions would bring them to my website? Is my website answering/solutionizing their issues? You then need to ensure your content is accessible and engaging to all these audiences.

2. Structure your content: Web visitors have a very short span of attention and are judging your website for relevant information in seconds. Structuring your content on the web is like a website makeover, where utilizing the Inverted Pyramid Model of content writing proves beneficial. Here, you need to place the most important/headlines at the top of the page and then progressively move to more specific and factual data. Making your text scannable is another habit you need to incorporate while you structure your content. Instead of verbose paragraphs, use bullet points or numerical listing which will make your content look organised. White space, is the best friend of a web designer where they would allow empty space around images, text and other website elements. A decent amount of space around text eases your eyes and makes it look more legible. Love at first site is applicable here, make sure you make it worthy.

3. KISS (Keep it Simply Short) rule: As the attention span of the audience is reducing, research proves that readers today prefer sentences with less than 35 words. And also an average reader reads at a 7th to 9th grade level. We recommend you to use more nouns and verbs compared to adverbs and adjectives.

4. Active voice gets more engagement: In order to draft user-friendly and actionable sentences you must consider using active voice compared to passive. For example, you can say, “Visit your nearest outlet for great deal” compared to “Our outlets have great deals”. Active voice is a direct form of communication, which drastically increases the engagement levels of a reader.

5. Avoid technical jargon: The web is for the world and not just for your technical circle. So you need to ensure that your content on the web educates/informs/imparts knowledge to the world, for which it needs to be generic. Define niche terms, if you use acronyms-spell them out in the first reference, provide hyperlinks to other webpage which can help the reader to know more.

6. Variety of words is the key: Words are like cookies, we all have our number one. But in order to keep your audience engaged, you need to use variety. You may have exhausted a word by using it too often. Type it into Thesaurus.com (Can link) to find new synonyms to complement your content. While you enhance your web content, do not miss out on your primary keywords which should appear throughout your web page systematically. not looking like a word crowd. Keeping a positive tone of text is always a pleasant read. Example, use “invoice” over bill, use “client” over patient.

7. Blend multimedia: Many a times a picture/graphic speakers for itself and doesn't need text to support or elaborate it. Research shows that 90 percent of the information transmitted to the human brain is visual, and people process visual information 60,000 times faster than text. Images or videos also helps break up text monotony making it easier to distinguish sections on a webpage. We therefore recommend you to incorporate 30% images/video and 70% text on your webpage.

8. Hyperlink keywords: Your website is great when it allows the reader to navigate from one page to another in a smooth synchronised manner. Help users find meaningful content by hyperlinking certain keywords to other relevant pages on your website. Recheck if the right page is linked with the right keyword/phrase as this can make or break your audience engagement score. These internal linking are extremely beneficial for your SEO but remember overloading your text with too many links will confuse the readers’ directly contributing to higher number of disengaged readers’.

9. Call-to-Action text is critical: A website which generates sales or achieves its desirable goals gets its readers’ to reach its conversion page. Between information sharing and conversion comes a thick line called “Call-to-action button”.Keep them blunt and initiate it with an action word like “Share”, “Buy now”, “Book now”, Sign up”, Watch”, etc. After which hyperlink this button to actually allow the user to complete the action.

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