Yahoo! publishes SEO style guide for websites

Search engine company Yahoo! has revealed they are to publish a style guide for the internet, with the aim of improving website content. Entitled ‘The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World’, the publication is edited by senior editorial director at Yahoo, Chris Barr, and will be released in July 2010.

The basic idea of the style guide is to offer guidance to content writers, editors and designers on subjects such as:

• Identifying and writing for a target audience
• Establishing a unique voice
• Making content accessible and easy to read
• Optimising web pages for search engines

In the publication, Yahoo! has compiled years of expertise and knowledge, making it what they call a ‘go-to manual’ for those in the industry.

Yahoo! and publishing company St. Martin’s Press hope the book will serve as a comprehensive guide to writing for the internet, helping to improve clarity and accuracy within content writing.

Many industry experts are eagerly anticipating the release of the Yahoo! style guide, including head of the Nielson Norman Group Jakob Nielsen, who has described it as an:

“Excellent and eminently useful book with many compelling examples of rewrites.”