Structured Writing and Site Visibility
Increasing Search Engine Optimization and Usability
Sep 24, 2008
Popular search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN's Live Search offer a powerful way for websites to get their messages and products out to market. Companies, business owners, and artists no longer have to search for their audience. In fact, their audience is out there searching for them--they just need to be easy to find. And that means having visibility.
Visibility
Site visibility refers to how easy it is for the public to find (see) a website. This can be measured by how highly the site ranks in search engine results. It can also be assessed by the number of site pages that have been indexed in a given search engine. Relatively speaking, the greater the number of pages indexed, the easier it is for people to find the website and then quickly access the exact information that led them to search there in the first place. This last bit is often called usability.
Creating a site with great usability involves information architecture, layout design, and navigation standards. But, making the actual text content of the site more usable is best done with structured writing.
Structured writing is the best approach to use in creating highly visible web content, because it simultaneously benefits search-engine-focused SEO and human-focused usability factors. If the content of the page itself is not first easy for humans to read and crawler's to crawl, then writers, producers, and SEO experts that pour resources into developing meta tags and keywords will find their efforts to be of little SEO benefit.
Structured Writing to Increase SEO
When someone is engaged in the process of authoring content for a website, they should write for the site’s intended audience, but also to increase search engine visibility. People should never write purely for search engines rankings at the expense of human readers. Readers and business objectives should always be first and foremost in the writer's mind.
Writing exclusively for search engines (by spamming content and meta data with keywords) may give an artificial and temporary boost to site traffic. But, ultimately, it will lead to site abandonment and severely damage both the site’s credibility and reputation. Increasing the usability of content results in a stickier website, meaning, that the site content entices users return more frequently and stay longer.
Structured writing offers a very simple way for writers to create quality SEO content that search engines can index easily. At the same time, studies have shown that structured writing makes it easier for people to read, learn from, and remember content.
