Learn more about what web content is in this article.
Web content is the text, audio, or visual content that is published on a website. This is the most important part of a website as without any content, a website would be empty and of no use. Creating engaging and eye-catching content is the key to getting a website higher in the search engines to attract visitors. Web content can be defined as the resources that people value and it is the main reason why people visit, share, find, and link to webpages.
In the book 'Information Architecture for the World Wide Web', Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville wrote: "We define content broadly as 'the stuff in your website.' Web content may include webpage document pages, information, software data and applications, e-services, images, audio and video files, personal webpages, archived email messages stored on email servers, and more. And we include future web content as well as present web content roadmap."
Types Of Web Content
Text
Text is the simplest type of content. It can be defined as the written content on the page. Text is used to give information to readers and can be written in text blocks or in images. Without any text, websites would have to rely on sound to deliver information to users, which would make a website inaccessible to visitors with hearing impairments. Text can also include links that point to other pages of the website or external websites.
Multimedia
Multimedia refers to any content that is not text. Examples of multimedia include:
Images - These are the most common type of multimedia. They are useful for visually displaying information, facts, and messages, drawing visitor's attention, and overall improving the user experience of a website. Clip art, illustrations, vectors, drawings, and photographs are types of images that can be added to a website. Instead of reading a large amount of text, readers can quickly look at an image or a photograph which can be very engaging.
Animations - These are types of images that animate. Examples of these are GIF files. Animations can distract readers, so it is not recommended to add too many to a page.
Audio - These files consist of sound. Audio files can be added to a website so that users can hear information, messages, stories, and songs on a page.
Videos - These display moving visual media with sound and are great for expressing information to readers. However, when adding video files, it is important that webmasters ensure that the video is compatible with multiple web browsers. Webmasters often upload the video to a video-sharing site, such as YouTube and embed it into their webpage.
Content Management Systems
Since websites are complex, the term 'content management' was introduced in the late 1990s to identify a method or tool to organise all the different elements of a website. Content management systems are applications used to create, manage, modify, and publish web content in a graphical user interface (GUI) without knowledge of markup, stylesheet, and programming languages. These simplify the process of users adding content to their websites and the CMS acts as a system for creating webpages and storing images and other content. WordPress is an example of a content management system (CMS).
How To Write Good Web Content? - Dos and Don'ts
The tips below should help you to write good web content.
The dos:
Create posts with at least 200 words. The ideal number of words for each post is 200-5000 words.
Focus more on writing content for readers rather than search engines. Consider this: Would you write this content if search engines didn't exist?
Keep content accurate and up to date.
Use titles and headings.
Write enough content to answer the reader's question and thoroughly cover the topic.
Organise the content into paragraphs with subheadings rather than in one big block of text. This will make content skimmable.
Use multimedia, such as images, audio, and videos, to represent information.
Use bullet points to represent lists of information as these are more readable and can show up in search engines.
Ensure that ads can be clearly differentiated from the content of the website.
Use acronyms for long abbreviations (e.g. HTML for Hypertext Markup Language).
Add alt attributes that display when the image failed to load for accessibility reasons.
Write important information as text rather than embedding it into images and videos as search engines cannot read and display embedded text in the SERP page.
Be clear and go straight to the point.
The don'ts:
Plagiarise content from other websites. Often, search engines are aware of plagiarised content and can recognise it. Search engines have algorithms that can determine the best version of every piece of content. If the content first appeared on a high-ranking website, search engines will crawl the original webpage and ignore the others.
Publish content with spelling, grammatical, or punctuation errors. This will cause readers to think that the website is unprofessional.
Use line breaks for every new sentence. This will make pages much longer and line breaks should only be used when starting a new paragraph.
Waffle when writing content (e.g. express the same information multiple times but in different words) or be vague and not make any clear points.
Write excessively long introductions or end paragraphs that have little value to readers.
Stuff content with keywords. Creating poor quality content that is loaded with keywords to manipulate the search engine ranking has little value for readers.
Make content look spammy and full of links. If possible, try to use hyperlinks so that they are embedded into the page.
Use overly complex wording - this can come across as awkward or pretentious. (e.g. whoever wrote this content is putatively meritorious, but received admonitions for their content length)
Use excessive amounts of jargon - not all readers are experts, so try using simpler terminology when possible.
Post false or inaccurate information that misleads users.
