Step 1: Focus on Content and Code

While many other guides might start with tactics for building traffic, we will start by discussing your content. After all, why make a herculean effort to drive people to your site if, when they get there, it’s a dud? You’ve got to deliver value and make the most of each visitor. So let's start by analyzing the site you’re driving traffic to in terms of content and code.

Give Your Customers Value

Writing good content for your site is about giving your customers value. By providing true, relevant content, you are doing two things:

1. Respecting the time and energy of both your customers and non-customers by allowing them to quickly judge the relevancy of your site to their needs.
2. Providing your customers and/or readers with a good value for their time when they are reading your site, blog, or newsletter.

Giving site visitors relevant and non-disposable content with a long shelf life has many additional benefits for you as well, including:

• increasing your readership.
• getting people to link and/or talk about you.
• creating "stickiness", which is getting readers to come back.
• building a brand for your company.
• marketing your company as a respectable, trustworthy source.
• promoting yourself as an intelligent and sincere person.

Format Your Content

Formatting your content is an important part of engaging your readers and encouraging them to read on. It's not just the content of your website, newsletter, or blog that matters: the formatting of this content determines how much your content is read and absorbed. Current research using eyetracking software shows us exactly how visitors read and scan through material to determine which items are worth their time. A page with a huge block of text is an eyesore to anyone trying to read it. Breaking up your pages and formatting your content is crucial to maximizing your site's readability.

After writing your content using the hallmarks of good copywriting, follow these guidelines to format your content for the web:

• Use bullet points
  Bullet points are a great way to list your ideas in a concise format.
• Edit your material for relevance and brevity
  Don't create an emotional attachment to your business writing—snip at will to keep your information on task!
• Use typography and font hierarchy
  In your style guides or stylesheets, designate different font treatments for headings, subsections, body text, and links.
• Write, rewrite, and really focus on your headings and subheadings
  Your section titles can make or break the information that comes after them. Being precise and clear will help you to get more readers for the rest of your information.
• Write in an easy-to-understand, conversational tone
  Using too much technical jargon or writing text that doesn't flow will only help you lose your readers.
• Increase your line height
  Increasing the line height in your code increases the white space between lines and makes the text easer to read.
• Break up your text with paragraphs and punctuation
  Providing content in bite-sized amounts can be easier for a visitor to process and absorb than long-winded, endless paragraphs. Don't be shy about breaking things up with punctuation and new paragraphs. 

To learn more about creating quality content and writing for the web, check out these links:

• Dartmouth Web Teaching Articles: Writing for the Web
• Email Newsletters: Surviving Inbox Congestion by Dr. Jakob Nielsen
• Scannable Content from ProBlogger
• Web Writing Basics
• Writing Articles from A List Apart
• Writing on the Web by Dr. Jakob Nielsen
• Writing Well for the Web: Webreference's Quick and Easy Tips for Non-writers