When all is said and done, most of the content of your site will be text. A site that updates content regularly is likely to feature a lot of text articles, your navigation and links need to be in text, your code is text-based… you just can’t get away from words.

At the same time, the internet is all about technology. We worry about the way search engine algorithms will interpret our codes, we want new widgets to function properly, and we fret over file size. It all gets very technical. Who has time to worry about the words themselves?

Every single one of your users, that’s who. Spelling and grammar are those things that people notice without noticing. Even people who proclaim they can’t spell will unconsciously pick up on bad spelling, and end up with the feeling that a site is cheap and unprofessional. Properly formed content is just one of the reasons to consult an expert, and you should talk to us at SEO Consult about your content needs.

There are very few articles in the SEO world that talk about proper English in web content, and even fewer that advise on the specifics. Here are some of the more common errors:

Apostrophes: This is an area in which many people struggle, both in general life and on the net. The thing to keep in mind is that apostrophes indicate contraction or possession. For example, ‘Janice’s’ indicates that Janice owns it, where as ‘Janices’ indicates that there is more than one Janice in the room. The apostrophe in the word ‘it’s’ is there because it’s a contraction of ‘it is’. ‘Don’t’ is a contraction of ‘do not,’ ‘can’t’ is a contraction of ‘cannot’ and so on. The only tricky one is ‘won’t’ which is a contraction of ‘will not’, but that’s English for you.

Word styles: Each print publication has its own style manual, and your website should too. It can be very annoying to see ‘web site’, ‘web-site’ and ‘website’ scattered at different places on a site. Your SEO strategy might require alternative spellings of things throughout your website, but there are ways to do this without looking clumsy. Talk to your SEO consultant for advice.

Punctuation styles: You will notice, in reading a book, that the punctuation is fairly uniform. Possibly, if it fits in well enough, you won’t notice it. Punctuation has to be decided just as word styles do. The things to take into consideration are how long your hyphens should be, for instance ‘-’ or ‘-’, and whether to include commas inside or outside quote marks: ‘like so,’ or ‘like so’, for example.

Spelling region: This is a fairly obvious one, but it is an area international businesses need to think about. If your website offers services in another country, you will need to think about which region of English you wish to feature. Decide on one and stick with it.

These are just a few of the things that sites commonly need to brush up on when it comes to their web content. Search engine optimisation does have the immediate aim of pleasing machines, but if your users don’t stay then attracting traffic is useless. With words, a little bit of polish goes a long way.

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