Headings are important signposts to people to visually navigate a site and find the information quickly. Headings should operate like flags to the reader, remember searchers are operating like hungry beasts on your site scanning your headings to find a possible answer to their question. The headings should be visually distinct, direct and if possible keep it short, but SEO has added to the importance of headings and they are now of interest to more than just human readers, so I want to talk about the text on a website in general, not just headings now to shed light on all the purposes text has on a website and who's responsible for text in a web relationship. Why? Not many people want the job of writing content for their site and without it the job can't start or finish. If it's taken up by somebody they often put their heart and soul into it to make it just right, so when the time comes to hand over the text to the Developer, it can then be difficult to see the text unravelled, deconstructed and apparently unappreciated. Writers are usually only focused on human audiences for their text, this post sheds light on the demands on the text from the web side, the text not only has to read, it has to WORK. It has a function beyond conveying meanings to humans and no matter how sincere and well written the text is, if it doesn't fulfil it's web functions, it's unlikely to receive a significant human audience anyway.
Who's responsible for Generating Content?
You are. When building a new website, you'll be called on by your web developer to supply content about your business and products, this is normal. Content means images, graphics and text and this can be a surprise to some clients. When it comes to text, there is nobody better than you, perhaps only your staff, who can come up with relevant subjects for content as you know your industry, your unique selling points and your customer's needs best. Often, there is an expectation that the web developer supplies content and this expectation can extend to logos, video, images, policy documents, everything. This isn't the case: graphic designers do logos, video editors do video, photographers do photography. In the case of text for your website, I assure you your Web Developer probably isn't a qualified copywriter. Copy writing is a distinctly different skill than web development. The Web Developer's area is the structure of your website itself and it's functionality, so the job of generating content is yours unless you are willing to incur the cost of hiring a Copywriter.
Meandering organically in web development is called Disorganisation
One of the first task a web developer will do when starting your job is to understand the content you want on your site and create a navigation system for it. If the Developer is held up waiting for you to supply a overview of the content you want on your site, they can't be assured that the work they're doing is realistic. Meandering organically through web development is costly, so you should expect your web developer to lead the process and request content by certain times. Expect a limit to reworkings and expect a point when new ideas simply can't be included, idea generation is for the early stages of the website planning and once coding gets underway it will be restricted, probably by constraints of the Navigation and especially when developing a responsive site that goes to phone.
Once your text is written, the Developer will allocate it to a page within the navigation and a box within the structure of the page. Days of coding to format the text to the look of your branding will ensue and then the reshaping of the text can begin for the non-human audience. You see, a SEO specialist will be making sure that Spiders find your words and phrases in all the likely hangouts that spiders like to go.
As you can imagine, trawling the far corners of the internet for sites to read and catalogue is a huge job for a search engine. Google says they have found 30 trillion URLs on the web and they crawl over 20 billion pages on a typical day. To do the job of reading and cataloguing all this information, Google created a little robot called ‘Googlebot’. Each search engine has one of these little robots and in SEO they’re called Spiders, Crawlers or Bots.
Spiders don't read like humans do. When the text is finished it may not even be what you would consider grammatically correct writing and certainly not what a good creative writing course would tell you to do for human readers. The conventions of good writing are not the same when writing for spiders, for example, the words we really need spider to see will be shown to spiders more than once, so it's not advisable to find an interesting variety of descriptive language as you would for humans, repetition is key when it comes to a spider. Headings, usually signposts to readers, are an opportunity for Spider bait. In some cases the use of grammar may inhibit spider from seeing a series of words we call key phrases, so grammar is ditched for the sake of rank.
Conclusion
So you see, there are demands and pressures on your text from all sides on the web. For text to perform and bring in the readers, it needs to convey something interesting, look attractive, convey which order its to be read, but above all and first text needs to be findable by a spider. It really is a process, the words you generate are fed into the cycle raw and are refined and added to, to come out the other side highly functioning. Now that you know I hope you are able to enjoy the process of your website development a whole lot more and get that text to your Developer quickly, knowing that they are going to change it considerably and really do appreciate your effort. In fact, they couldn't do it without you.
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