Writing for the Web? Keep it short

These lessons from UX researcher, Jakob Nielsen, help drive a few points home. In short, his eye-tracking studies show that copywriting should be kept as short and concise as possible.

• The first ten seconds is critical.The average page visit lasts a little less than a minute. That's just enough time to read a quarter of the text on a full page. Takeaway, keep it to a few sentences, or make the top paragraph contain all the information you really need. Here's the good news, if they make it past 20 seconds, the chances they'll stay to read the rest of the content is very high.
• Readers are only interested in 20% of what's on the page. On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.
• The back button is the third most used feature on a website. It's the rip cord people pull when they don't find what they want on your website. Don't break it, respect its utility, be glad it's there, but pray to the internet gods they don't use it.
• Write content so it can be scanned. If you track what eyeballs see on the page, you'll draw what they call an inverted pyramid. Headlines and content at the top of the page make the "base" of the pyramid, and scattershot scans of the rest of the page make the "tip." Otherwise, eyeballs tend to be drawn to and make slight rest upon highlighted sub-headings, highlighted keywords, bulleted lists, and one idea per paragraph.
• Video content should be kept short and removed of talking heads. Online video differs from TV in that TV is a passive experience while multimedia users tend to drive their own experience. Nothing removes the fact that talking heads are boring and the skip button is omnipresent.
• All of the above is true for mobile content, but intensified. Desktop copywriting must be concise, mobile copywriting must be _even more concise_.

This reflects the eye-tracking studies I've seen elsewhere, including those during my time at Google. There are a lot of tricks here, and it should be noted that a lot of these tricks are particularly applicable anywhere on the web. In fact, writing for accessibility and SEO more often than not aligns with writing for the attention spans of most audiences.