Journalism Principles to Consider When Writing Content

Writing content for your website is an increasing challenge.  Journalism Principles to Consider regardless of whether you are writing for Google Adsense or to attract customers to your company’s site to sell more products must be considered. Readers have a short attention span and if you do not capture their interest in the first paragraph or above the fold, then there is less chance of them staying on your site. They move on quickly so the first rule of thumb is to put the good stuff up front to keep their attention.

If you are a journalist or a writer for online content, make sure you always place the really good tidbits up front. So in keeping with this rule, the good stuff is always upfront, use catch titles that will attract the reader in the first place, and place enough content on the page so that your bounce rate is as long as possible. We add more on these two topics in subsequent paragraphs.

Journalism Principles to Consider – Bounce Rate

Some people think that Google looks at bounce rate as a measure of interest by the reader. A short bounce rate means that either your content is not very good or it did not match what the reader was looking for. A bounce rate that is consistently short is usually going to mean that Google lowers you on the index results of searches or SERP and then no one is going to see your page. A longer bounce rate or higher one means that readers found your page interesting enough to stay long enough to read it and consider it. The bottom line in addition to placing the good stuff up front is to write consistently great content that readers will stay and read.

Journalism Principles to Consider – Titles

When Google, Bing, or Yahoo presents search results they list the title and a brief summary below the title. Based on this limited information we all decide on whether the site is relevant enough to our area of interest. If it is we click on it and if not we move to the next result. Your title is the most important element at this point and plays a major part in helping the reader to decide if it is worth their time to click on the result or not. Make your titles interesting, clear, and concise so that the reader can decide if this is something they should click on.

There are lots of other factors in Journalism Principles to Consider When Writing Content, however, if you focus on writing good content in a manner that readers will read, then you are well on the way to attracting readers to your site.