Writing for the Web: Be Read, Be Found, Be Cited
A practical course for organizations that write their own web pages
Your organization does important work, and almost nobody will read the page you wrote about it. That is not a judgment on your writing — it is how the web works. Visitors arrive from a search result, scan for a few seconds, and leave if they cannot see an answer. Increasingly, they do not arrive at all: an AI assistant reads your page on their behalf and summarises it for them.
This course teaches you to write pages that survive both. Over seven short modules you will learn how visitors actually read on a screen, how to plan a page before you write a word, how to write clearly and structure honestly, how search engines decide what your page is about, how AI answer engines decide whether to quote you, and how to tell whether any of it worked.
It is written for community organizations, non-profits, and research groups — people who write their own web pages between everything else they do. There is no jargon you will not need, no tricks, and nothing that requires a budget. Every module opens with a summary you can read on its own, and closes with a five-question quiz that will not fail you.
You can work through it in about two and a half hours, or one module at a time over a few weeks. Your progress is saved as you go, if you subscribe.
Objectives
- Write a page a hurried visitor can use in the first ten seconds.
- Plan a page before writing it, and publish fewer, better pages.
- Structure a page so that people, search engines and AI systems all understand it.
- Choose what a page is about, and say so in its title, description and address.
- Write in a way that an AI answer engine can quote and attribute to your organization.
- Tell whether any of it is working, using free tools.
Who is this course for?
Anyone who writes or edits web pages for a community organization, a non-profit, or a research group — communications staff, coordinators, researchers, volunteers. No technical background is assumed. If you can edit a page in WordPress, you can take this course.
Course content
Three audiences, one page
Why reading on a screen is different, how visitors really scan, and what SEO and GEO actually mean.
- Explain why a web page is not a printed document.
- Describe how visitors scan a page.
- Name the three audiences every page has.
- Define SEO and GEO, and say how they differ.
The work that happens before the first sentence
Why publishing less is usually better, and the five questions that settle what a page should say.
- Decide whether a page should exist at all.
- Write down the objective of a page in one sentence.
- Describe who the page is for and what they arrived wanting.
- Apply the rule of one page, one topic.
- Writing the Page3 min
Conclusion first, plain words, active voice
Front-loading, plain language, the active voice, and the small habits that make a page scannable.
- Front-load a page so the main point comes first.
- Replace long words and passive constructions.
- Write as “we” to “you”, without becoming glib.
- Break text into paragraphs, lists and subheadings a visitor can scan.
Headings, links and alt text carry the meaning
One H1, honest heading levels, link text that says where it goes, and alt text that earns its place.
- Use one H1 per page and nest H2 and H3 correctly.
- Write link text that makes sense out of context.
- Decide what an image’s alt text should say — including when it should say nothing.
- Recognise why accessible structure and machine-readable structure are the same thing.
Intent, key phrases, titles, descriptions and links
Choosing what a page is about, saying so in the title, description and address, and connecting your pages to each other.
- Start from what someone is trying to do, not from a keyword.
- Choose one key phrase per page and avoid competing with yourself.
- Write a page title and description for the search results page.
- Build internal links, and know why linking out helps you.
- Read an SEO plugin’s advice critically.
How to become the source an answer reaches for
E-E-A-T for an organization, writing quotable statements, structured data, and the authority you cannot write yourself.
- Explain what changed when answers replaced lists of links.
- Apply E-E-A-T to an organization rather than to an individual.
- Write statements a machine can lift without distorting them.
- Describe what structured data does, in plain terms.
- Build the reputation signals you cannot produce on your own site.
Free tools, honest questions, and a review cycle
Search Console, GA4, asking your visitors, cheap user testing, and a maintenance routine that actually gets done.
- Use Google Search Console to see the searches that reach your pages.
- Know what changed between Universal Analytics and GA4.
- Read a small number of figures without over-interpreting them.
- Run a cheap, useful user test.
- Set a review cycle so pages do not quietly rot.
Credit(s)
Myriam-Zaa Normandin. This course draws on the Heriot-Watt University web content guide, the Nielsen Norman Group’s research on reading behaviour, the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, Google Search Central documentation, and the Yoast SEO knowledge base. Every reference was checked in August 2026.