Search Engine Optimization is the process of writing and structuring web pages in a way that will increase the visibility of search engine results. This is an easy way to get higher page rankings. Creating higher page rankings can ensure the continued growth of referral traffic. More traffic means more eyeballs, more chances to share a message, and more opportunities to sell a product.
A secondary goal of SEO is to build content that directs users to the most relevant pages when they arrive via a search engine. Building content in a way that helps users to find the exact information they are looking for immediately, without having to click around, also helps to retain readers.
Structured Writing
Structured writing is a technique of organizing and presenting content in a way that readers can understand quickly and clearly. It's also meant to elicit a certain result. In designing a web environment, the desired results might include:
- Increasing and retaining visitor traffic
- Increasing sales
- Driving visitors to a particular page or product
- Creating an engaged, lean-forward, interactive experience
- Making information easy to understand and products easy to locate
- Streamlining a shopping process
Structured writing is a reader-focused approach to writing, where content is broken into chunks. Because it's created with the reader in mind and designed to increase usability and layout flexibility, people find it easier to read and web-crawler apps (spiders) are able to do a better job in indexing content for search engines like Google, Yahoo!, or MSN's Live Search.
The essential basics of structured writing involve:
- Leading with a paragraph that defines the content of the page
- Developing easy-to-scan content
- Breaking information into chunks
The History of Structured Writing
Structured writing was originally developed by computer businesses and military organizations. In dealing with complex subject matters and varied audiences, these organizations were looking for ways to communicate written content in a way that readers could understand faster and learn from easier. These techniques have been proven in the fields of psychology, instructional design, and learning theory. More recently, usability tests have been used to observe the ways in which people read and process information presented on the web. Such usability tests have proven the advantages of structured writing and helped to evolve it further.
Advantages of Structured Writing
Structured writing is considered to be the most effective way to communicate with readers in a web environment. Structured writing is not meant to limit the writer or constrain the creative process. Rather, it uses specific and proven methods to present material in a way that it is easy to read, learn, remember, and act on. It should not slow down the writing process. Actually, adopting some structured writing practices might just make writing faster and easier.
When creating global DTC websites, structured writing techniques are highly beneficial. They increase SEO for enhanced visibility rankings and streamline the translation process for multi-lingual sites. This helps to attract a wider audience, and at the same time, it saves time, money, and effort.
