How to make your articles accessible online?

In the morning today, as I was finalizing this article on improving the performance of your content online, the Society of Indian Law Firms made an email announcement of the start of a campaign for lawyers. The campaign is titled “Plain English”. The objective of the campaign is to sensitize lawyers and popularise the use of simple and non-complex words in legal documents from the current usage of something we lawyers call “legalese”. Trust, the timing could not have been better for legal fraternity to start this campaign and I feel that not just the legal profession but other professions too should think of doing the same.

We are living in an era where Google is a digital public library that has made every kind of information accessible to everyone. However, it has been a norm in professions such as law, accounting, medical to use heavy, complex, and verbose vocabulary. Often, write-ups from professionals in these fields come across as academic paper presentations with the throw of verbose Latin words and jargon. I agree this is what helped us all excel interviews and get good grades however I strongly feel this must stop. Mostly, these words are beyond the comprehension of a lot of readers who are not well-versed with the topic but are searching for information online. Now that Google has made the information easily available, it is the time that we make our writings also accessible!

Hindi the way we speak and read today is much simpler than it was in the era of Ramayana and Mahabharata (Remember those Ramanand Sagar's TV Series). Similarly, English has evolved from being a Latin heavy language. You prove yourself as a better communicator if you are able to put across your point in simple English made up of non-complex sentences.

Today, our writings are for netizens browsing the internet. Accordingly, we need to change our writing style to improve the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) which is a sum of a number of factors while you are writing and while you are publishing your webpage online. The more efforts you will put in making your article SEO friendly better will be its reach.

Following are some key pointers to help you improve your writing thereby making it easily reachable and readable for web-searchers. This will then definitely lead to a material improvement in search engine rankings.

Deciding the words for the title of your article or web page: Go online, and Google a few relevant phrases or keywords related to your topic. By now Google will predict and suggest phrases related to your search. Look at the suggestions by Google on what you are trying to search, these are the words that should feature in your article especially in the title, headings, subheadings, and initial paragraphs.

Do not use complicated terms in the title unless you are very sure that your target audience is well aware of the same. In case the usage is necessary then the same should be explained in laymen’s language in the initial paragraphs itself.

Headings: Place the keywords at the beginning of your article in headings, subheadings, and starting of each paragraph (search engines assume earlier words within the text are more important) to ensure it is crawled when someone is searching for that information online.

Sub-headings:  SEO experts suggest that wherever possible the word-formation of the sub-heading phrase should be a question type. This is because a lot of time when someone is searching for information on the internet, they will put the questions, and if your subheading closely matches the question of the reader your article will rank well in SEO.

Writing Style: If you are a lawyer replace legalese with plain talk. For instance, you can use "adverse dismissal" or "being fired unfairly” at different points of your article to target different kinds of readers.

Simple Language: You have to remember that you are writing to connect with readers by your words and not to flaunt. The language should be as simple as possible. This doesn’t come naturally to most of us so we need to be conscious and use the words or phrases which others will use to search for information online. If you are used to a complex style of writing reword your phrases, reword your sentences, and reword your paragraphs to reduce text complexity (ex. “harsh heat” becomes “very hot”).

Read, re-read, and re-read to make it easy to understand for those who are not very well versed in your profession’s jargon. Substitute complex words for simple words or phrases Shorten complex and lengthy sentences and break it into two or more simple sentences.

Use Transition Words: Transition words are used when you are moving from one part of the paragraph to another in consecutive sentences. They are important in SEO as they make it easy for Search Engine Crawlers to read your article and understand a text which is very important for SEO.

By this, I mean although the transition words don’t influence your SEO directly, they are one of the key factors in improving the readability and structuring of your text which attracts search engine crawlers and then readers to your blog to contribute to SEO!

Consecutive Sentences- Sentences that come one after the other in a paragraph are consecutive sentences. Consecutive sentences should be well-connected to each other as it improves the readability of your text and makes it easy to understand by web crawlers. Following should be kept in mind while writing consecutive sentences-

1.   Do not start sentences with the same words over and over in a continuous paragraph. It looks awkward and repetitive to the readers and web crawlers

2.   Consecutive sentences use transition words to establish a connection. You should pay special attention and avoid repetition when using the transition words such as and, but, so, etc.), relative pronouns (this, that, these, those, who, whoever, whom, whomever, which, when, where, and whose) and personal pronouns (I, you, it, she, he etc.). Articles (the, a, an) are obviously also often used to start sentences. Avoid repetition in transition words and consecutive sentences. Consider the following example:

 Example: We went to the doctor for medical check-up and vaccination. And then we went to the children’s park. And then we took our son to McDonald's and bought a Happy Meal. And then we decided to stop at Ice-Cream Parlour. But the Ice-Cream Parlour was very crowded But then we went home at 9 PM. And then we went to sleep.

Here is how we can use transition words better in consecutive sentences

We went to the doctor for a medical check-up and vaccination. And then we went to the Children’s park. From there, John and I took our son to McDonald's and bought him a Happy Meal. After that, we decided to stop at the Ice-Cream Parlour, however, we dropped the idea as it was very crowded. Finally, we reached home at 9 pm and went to sleep.

 Enumerations: Enumerations or bullet point format is considered SEO Friendly as it is easy to read. If you are writing in bullet points, it is an acceptable practice to have several sentences in a row starting with the same words. Take this example- 

• If you want to stay healthy, you should exercise and eat in the right portions
• If you don’t want to stay healthy do not exercise and eat food rich in sugar and fats.
• If you want to stay healthy and are a foodie eating food rich in sugar and fats burn those calories by exercising. 

In the above example of using bullet points, the transition word, “If” in the beginning provide structure, which makes it easier to read and process the information. However, if you don’t present your enumeration in a visual format, like a bulleted list. The use of the same transition word will be poor writing and can get boring for the readers.

Best Practices :

1. If there is an update in the article you had written earlier it is better to make changes in an existing article than to write a new one. Each of your articles will have a ranking and link in Google so this way you preserve its ranking and its currency and will increase the cumulative number of clicks on your article.
2. Do not use more than two-three sentences of not more than 20 words per paragraph.
3. Use sub-headings and bullet points to break up the piece as much as possible. WordPress suggests a good paragraph length for any article is 120 - 150 words.
4. For good Search Engine Optimization, the total text length of the article should be between 400 – 2000 words
5. For making your article easier to locate by search engine crawlers refrain from using punctuations like commas, underscores, or dashes in title or headings as it affects the performance of your content in SEO competition.

Happy Writing!