Tips for Effective Online Article Writing

All serious and passionate writers are hopeful that people will read what they write. One thing that they must understand though is that the success for online writers does not only lie on the brilliance of the content. Rather, it depends at least as much on how the article is presented and written. If you want your online article writing to be effective in terms of getting the attention of your target audience, know the rules for this medium and adjust your style to it. Remember that when writing online you are also aiming to generate quality traffic.

For traffic to be pumped, content is used to attract readership or audience. Here are some top tips that you can use for effective online article writing and to improve traffic.

1. You must write for browsers and not readers. People who do online reading wants to know right away at a glance if the material is worth their time or not. They will not go to your page and start reading from top to bottom as if it is a home reading assignment. Just like when you want to buy a book, you just read the synopsis, the review or testimonials. You do not read everything. For online writing, use bullets, headlines, subheadings and break up your paragraphs into short ones. You must have heard it before “one paragraph-one idea” principle. Stick to it to attract readers.

2. Write like a reader. What attracts you to read an online article? You do not read the first article you open, right? You look at an article, scan it and decide if it’s worth your time or not. You do not like it to be too finely written; you like a font size that is easy on the eye or easy to read. You like color, but not in the way that it hurts your eyes. You like ideas, but not when it is written like there is no tomorrow. You appreciate information, but not information overload. It is good to be well-researched, but you want an article to be tight and not covering too many topics even if they are all related.

3. Who doesn’t like pun? Readers like creatively written online articles, but not to the extent like it’s all pun so that the article is drowning in it. It becomes too hard to understand. The simplicity is also easily lost that way. The substance becomes too thin and the information becomes incoherent. Nobody appreciates very complicated, very long and very technical articles. Most turn to Internet articles in the hope of finding simpler to understand explanations to stuffs and ideas.

4. Use keywords and be found. You do not want your online articles to be buried deep in cyber space. Only when it’s found can people read what you wrote. So, know how to apply SEO (Search engine Optimization) techniques to optimize your articles. One way to optimize is by the way you use keywords or the words used by Internet users to search for articles. If you took time researching what these keywords are, then your article stand a good chance to be found. But, it is important too to critically place it in the starting paragraph for scanners to see it right away. And, if you do not want to catch the ire of Google do not overstuff your article with keywords.

5. Titles are important. String words suitably to make a good, catchy title that has the most important keywords. Your article is indexed by the search engines using the title; that is how important it is in terms of driving traffic and being indexed by search engines.

6. Open with a bang! Search engines make a list of the pages and under which is a brief description of what the article is all about which is usually the first paragraph. Thus, the first paragraph needs to have the keywords and at the same time must be interesting enough to grab the attention of Internet scanners.

Remember, while there are important elements to make online article writing effective, the appearance of the article in the website as well as the usability of the site matter too. Combining these elements can be powerful in driving traffic to the site.