Writing content for web users has its challenges. Chief among them is the ease with which your content is read and understood by your visitors (i.e. its readability).

When your content is highly readable, your audience is able to quickly digest the information you share with them — a worthy goal to have for your website, whether you run a blog, an e-store or your company’s domain.

Below are a handful of dead-simple tips and techniques for enhancing the usability and readability of your website’s content.

These tips are based on research findings and suggestions by well-regarded usability experts such as Jakob Nielsen.

General Goals of User-Friendly Web Content

---

Usable, readable web content is a marriage of efforts between web designers and web content writers.

Web pages must be designed to facilitate the ease of reading content through the effective use of colors, typography, spacing, etc.

In turn, the content writer must be aware of writing strategies that enable readers to quickly identify, read and internalize information.

As we go through the seven tips below, keep these three general guidelines in mind:

• Text and typography have to be easy and pleasant to read (i.e. they must legible).
• Content should be easy to understand.
• Content should be skimmable because web users don’t read a lot. Studies show that in a best-case scenario, we only read 28% of the text on a web page.

What simple things can we do to achieve these goals? – 7 Best Practices for Improving Your Website’s Usability

Old school SEO pros cover your ears, or be prepared to adapt your craft: Search engines are changing, and social media is a huge part of that change.

Bing, Google, and an increasing swath of nimble little search engines like Blekko and DuckDuckGo are incorporating social data into their results. This is potentially great news for new businesses trying to achieve visibility in search. It’s less great news for sites that rely heavily on link buying (illegal, but hard to catch), producing huge volumes of borderline-useless content (long-tail, content farm approach), or just really old domains (previously an SEO trump card).

Both Bing and Google admitted in interviews that their search results are positively affected by social signals, such as tweets, Facebook Likes, and +1s. – How Social Media Affects Content Relevance in Search

Here are the top Internet strategy, marketing and technology links for the week of September 11, 2011… [Read more...]

Back in the old days of, oh, maybe 7-8 years ago… you built a website, did some basic search engine optimizing on it, and waited for the leads to roll in …unless you could afford to accelerate the process by running some paid-search ads.

It’s a bit more complex today …and quite a bit more rewarding, as well.  Today, you have the opportunity to reinforce your website via…

• social networking
• social bookmarking
• your business blog
• social PR
• media sharing
• content marketing
• reputation management

…and there are probably a few more lurking just over the horizon.

What we need is one of those “life, the universe and everything” posts (apologies to Douglas Adams) from Tom Pick to sort all this out;  and would you believe? …there’s a recent one on his Webbiquity blog that fits the bill perfectly, and even includes this nifty graphic for the visually oriented. – Your Web presence needs to go far beyond your website

Grabbing readers’ attention, making them think and stimulating them to act is the primary goal of content marketing. To that end, there is much the great writers of the past can teach modern B2B marketing professionals about connecting with readers.

Because content marketing is all about influencing audiences, why not take some time to learn about writing from one of history’s most influential authors?

William Shakespeare’s impact on language and communication extends from theatre and literature to present-day films and everyday conversation. Widely regarded as history’s greatest English language writer, Shakespeare is the author of history’s second-most-quoted works (first place going to the King James Bible). Today, people routinely quote Shakespeare without having ever seen one of his plays, or even knowing that the everyday phrases they are using have been used for four centuries. – Let Shakespeare Add Poetry to Your Content Marketing

While the question of “what’s the R.O.I. of social media” is difficult to answer, it is necessary as it forces us to dig deeper. The result is maturity.

This conversation is important as you are expected to answer it not just today, but and also over time.  The source of the question though, may also impede innovation and experimentation. Why?  The answer in of itself is as elusive as the question asked. As much as the previous sentence sounds like a riddle, it is a very real observation. Often it is asked without a clear understanding as to whether or not the answer will actually change the company vision or the current course of business. Sometimes it is genuinely asked to do just that, change the vision and the course of business toward relevance. Either way, this is an opportunity to show how new media enables desired business outcomes. – What’s the R.O.I.? A Framework for Social Analytics

When Howard Schultz came on board with Starbucks in 1982, he advised the company to evolve its business from coffee beans and accessories to coffeehouse culture and espresso by the cup.  The idea was initially met with rejection from company founders.  Given Starbucks’ meteoric rise since then, the rest is history, with the lesson that businesses must be cognizant of market trends and embrace new channels that promise growth.

Similarly, retailers ignore social channels at their own risk, and a number of recent market trends have coalesced to make social commerce top of mind.  A majority (58%) of all consumers now research products online before purchasing, and half of those consumers publish comments or reviews online about the products they buy. Global e-commerce revenue figures continue to grow at a faster rate (19%) than the economy as a whole.  Over 750 million users have flocked to Facebook to interact and share with friends.  These developments have created a fertile ecosystem for retailers seeking to cultivate new revenue streams using social media. – 3 ways to build social commerce on your site