When creating web content the main focus is writing engaging text which delivers your message to the visitors. However, in order to even read your text the visitors first have to find your website. They do that either through your costly advertisements (online or offline) or by finding your website on their own in search engines at no cost to you.

One of your most important, most effective and cheapest means of online advertising is to simply be findable to those who are looking for what you offer. How do you do that? The trick is to have the search engines associate your website with the keywords your potential customers are searching for.

There are essentially two ways to keyword-optimize your website

1. One is called on-site search engine optimization (abbreviated SEO), and means to optimize the text on your website by making sure your keywords appear through-out the text in key location like the website title, headlines and link
2. The other is called off-site search engine optimization – or search engine marketing (abbreviated SEM). This means to have other websites link to your website using your selected keywords as the link-text. So when a website has a link like this: web design, search engines view it as a vote for the target website in the category “web design”. The more votes, the higher position in the search results when someone searches for “web design”.

This way keyword-optimizing your web content increases your websites findability greatly.

How do I choose the right keywords?
The main thing to remember when determining your company’s keywords is to keep the focus on your target group. Your keywords should be your target group’s keywords. This means that whatever words your target audience type into a search engine to find your products, these are the most important words to have on your website.

You can do keyword research yourself. Ask members of your target group. Search Google yourself to find out what keywords your competitors are using? Maybe all your competitors are focusing on the same keywords. Maybe there are synonyms for those keywords with lower competition. This could be an easy way to get a good position in the search engine result pages. An important tool when keyword-optimizing text is measuring the “keyword density”. Keyword density means the frequency of specific keywords in a text. For example: the word “keywords” appears 14 times on this page. That means a keyword density of around 2%. In other words, 2% of the words on this web page is “keywords”. A high keyword density means that search engines will deem your website relevant for that keyword.

The more competition there is in your market, the more you will benefit from thorough keyword research. Contact us to learn more about how your web findability can benefit from keyword competition research and keyword-optimization.

The purpose of your text is to deliver your message

People come to your website for answers. To persuade potential customers to invest time and money into your company, you have to first give them something of real value. If you avoid the usual sales-speak, and in stead offer useful information, your visitors will automatically consider you a serious provider in your field.

People find it easier to trust and relate to web-text which is informational, to-the-point and easy to read. When web-publishing text created for print, optimizing the text for web readability can make it many times more effective.

How new customers can find you on their own.

A great way to save money on offline marketing of your website, is to optimize your content to contain the keywords that your potential customers are searching for. This way interested visitors will arrive organically at your website.

Making sure that people can find your website where they search for it (Google, Yahoo, MSN and such) requires web content which has been optimized for findability. Findability optimization is an important part of search engine optimization (SEO).

Our services include:

• Web content development
• Web readability optimization
• Findability optimization

Contact us to know more about how a thoughtful and well-planned web project can benefit your business, or learn about how good web design delivers your message more effectively in ‘Show what you want to say: Visual communication‘.

The use of acronyms (such as “CAD” instead of “Computer Aided Design”) on a website is a problem for the usability of the website, specifically because it lowers the readability of the webpage. Acronyms make web text less understandable, lowers the reading speed, and lowers the user-experience in general. Keeping in mind that web users are usually very impatient it is not a good idea to slow them down. They will loose their patience. And then you will loose the sale.

When reading web text, visitors often scan the text rather than reading it (word for word). This means they might miss the definition of an acronym or they might be too distracted to learn a new term.

Your visitors are looking for information – not puzzles
Good web content writing is about telling stories. There is a story in the phrase “Web design & development”. Even if you have never heard this phrase it still gives you an idea of the meaning of the term. There is no story in “WD&D”. These are just letters, and they could mean any number of things. Web content should be specific and informational.

Bad communication is bad for business
While acronyms themselves do not tell a story, using them unfortunately tells a story of laziness, arrogance and snobbish exclusiveness. It is very rarely the aim to communicate these values to the reader.
By using acronyms you are asking people to pay very close attention and that is a big thing to ask from users on the web. You risk chasing away visitors.

Also a problem for search engine optimization.
In regards to search engine optimization, “business services” is a good key-phrase that your potential customers might be searching for, so it is important to get that indexed by search engines like Google and Yahoo. “BS” on the other hand is not a very good key-phrase. Using this acronym you are actually removing this key-phrase from your content, thus lowering the relevancy of your website in the search engines for people searching for that particular key-phrase. And that is of course a very bad idea.

To optimize your web content for usability, readability, findability, try replacing acronyms with their long form – your text will be easier to read and easier to understand.

You should only use acronyms on web pages in situations where the acronym has universal consensus and is so commonly known that the acronym has replaced its long form in everyday use. Situations like this might be CD, DVD, MP3, etc.
In cases where it is necessary to use an acronym it is a good idea to still define the long form of the acronym. On web pages this is done using the acronym-tags, which adds the long form definition to the acronym as a hover-effect, like this example: SEO (try to move the cursor over the acronym “SEO”).

Contact us to know more about how Search Engine Optimization can benefit your business.

• The more websites that link to your website the more people will be able to find you,
• the quality of those websites linking to you and their relevancy to your company determines your position in the most important search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN,
• your presence on the web must be designed to match the content of your website in order to be most effective.

Targeted search engine marketing (SEM) is a very effective way to get the relevant traffic to your website that can result in new customers. Our experience in search engine marketing can save you a lot of time and effort in promoting your website on the web.

Contact us to find out more about the benefits of good Search engine marketing.