Writing for the web is definetly both a science and an art.

When writing content for your website, you not only have to write it in such a way that it is easy to read for the viewer, but so that it is also ondexed by the search engines to drive traffic to your site.   Here are 10 tips to help you achieve that goal ......

Are you losing business because of your website? More and more customers are logging on to the Web to decide where to spend their money because it is quick and convenient, and they can jump from site to site instead of walking from store to store.

Web savvy customers don't need to be patient, studies have shown that you need to engage a potential customer very quickly by giving them easy, fast access to the information they need. Otherwise they will simply move on to the next site.

Appealing design and speedy functionality are important but they don't ensure that your site is well structured (intuitive) or well written (clear).

Think quick. In 10 seconds, can you list the 5 key benefits you offer your customers?

I bet you said “Yes�. But are you sure you listed benefits? If you’ll bear with me for another 10 seconds, I’d like to test out a theory on you.

Recap your answers – maybe even write them down. Now list the 5 main things your business does. In other words, what are your 5 core services? What are the 5 core features of your product?

You've identified the benefits you offer your customers, but how do you turn a list of benefits into engaging web copy which converts visitors into customers?

Recently I wrote an article explaining how to identify the benefits you offer your customers. That article challenged business owners and marketing managers to think in terms of benefits rather than features when writing their web copy.

What the article didn’t discuss was how to actually write the web copy once they had identified their benefits. That’s what this article is about. (It even gives you a couple of templates you can use to make your job a whole lot easier!)

1. Put yourself in your customers' shoes

The single biggest consideration to think about is that the website should be "visitor driven". That is, you should approach the content from your customers' point of view and not your own.

Your website is a marketing tool and as with all marketing tools you should begin with the question: "What drives my customers to purchase my product or service?"

People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In research on how people read websites we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word. (Update: a newer study found that users read email newsletters even more abruptly than they read websites.)