Writing for the Web

When you write for the Web, you write for both people and search engines. 

The college's guidelines on writing for the Web apply to anything that users would perceive to be a webpage, including a basic page of text, an online form, a calendar, etc.

• People read and/or interact with webpages.
• Search engines index the pages' content.

Write your content well for people, and the search engines will pretty much take care of themselves. For that reason, the information in this section is about writing for people. Once you've taken care of your human readers, see search optimization for some tips about search engines.

• Analyzing Your Audience
  Identify your specific audience(s) and their needs.
• Understanding Web Readers
  Learn what usability research says about how people read webpages.
• Writing Content for Web Readers
  Learn how to write content that will be easy for people to read and that will show up well in search results.
• Organizing Content
  Get tips on how to organize your website, including how to decide when to keep content on one page and when to break it up into multiple pages.
• Formatting Content
  Find out how to format your webpage to make it easy to read.

Whether you are a content author, a Web designer or a programmer, the information in this section can help you make your pages more readable, usable and searchable. (In addition to the information on this site, all college communications should follow the college's Writing Style Guide.)