In this piece of our multi-part series on effective communication using your website, we will talk about Content on the website. Content is king to visitors and search engine spiders. That’s why content should never be an afterthought – just something to fill in the white space between images and flashy multimedia presentations.
Text content is particularly important for search engine placement. Without original text content, most search engines will be unable to match search terms to the content of a site.
Communicate with well-structured content and good typeset:
- Use titles to direct attention and visually summarize the page’s text content. Separate the page in small text blocks and use <h1>, <h2>, and so forth, to avoid verbose and homogeneous pages that at first glance are tiring and take away the desire to read;
- Use bold to underline the most important concepts and make them stand out from the remaining text;
- Use good spacing, to make the text more legible and easy to read for visitors on the website.
Even though a business may organize to collect, contain and represent information online, content needs organization in such a manner to provide the reader (browser) with an overall “customer experience” that is easy to use, the site can be navigated with ease, and the website can fulfill the role assigned to it by the business, that is, to sell to customers, or to market products and services, or to inform customers.
The above guidelines although simple, and at times fairly logical do not show up consistently in several websites that we come across on a daily basis. Hence, making these websites extremely heavy on content, but very poor on quality and readability.
Stay Tuned for more in our series on Communication.