SEO copywriting: Searchwritten

It’s difficult to read long articles from screen. Fortunately, some clever guys invented printers. But printing some articles can be a real pain. Most webpages I try to print, don’t have a good workaround for this function. Among the greatest irritations are:

1. Navigation items that takes two pages
2. Text that is wider than my page
3. White pages or pages with only a title
4. Unreadable URLs
5. Flash or other applications which can’t be printed
6. Images that are broken done on the bottom of the page
7. Text in frames that can’t be printed

Let’s say something more about some of these irritations.

Some websites use different print pages. As a user, I’m not very happy with this. Most of the times, I don’t see the link to the print page and I just press Ctrl + P which most of the time doesn’t work that well. The only reason a separate print page might be useful, is when an article is spread over multiple URLs. The print page should contain the entire article.

Duplicate content

This is how SitePoint works. Articles are split in pieces of about 500 words. However, the complete article can be printed on www.sitepoint.com/print/article-name. The danger is of course that this leads to duplicate content and SitePoint doesn’t seem to be aware of this danger. The links to the print version are follow links and the print version isn’t excluded for indexation by a robots.txt file. By the way, SitePoint has another problem as well. Both of the following URLs lead to the same page:

• www.sitepoint.com/print/properties-glance-guide
• www.sitepoint.com/print/1231

Print pages at the ANWB

The Dutch organization ANWB offers a nice routing tool. The ANWB also uses a separate print page. This print page works well in the browsers I used for testing. However, it’s quite hard to find the link to the print page. This is frustrating because printing the normal page in Firefox doesn’t work that well. The routemap changes to a black or a white rectangle, depending on your printer. It’s hard to solve this problem because the Google Maps application uses JavaScript functions to navigate through the map. Google Maps itself doesn’t have a print version itself. The print version of the ANWB uses a .png file.

Irritation #2: Empty pages and more problems at SEOmoz

The blog pages of SEOmoz don’t have a separate print version. Internet Explorer prints their pages really nice, but Firefox doesn’t understand the print CSS. I assume most visitors of SEOmoz will use Firefox. The first page only shows the title of the blog. The blog itself starts at page #2, which leaves a nearly empty first page.
SEOmoz does have another problem with their print functionality. I tries to print a page of about 2,000 words. In the opposite order, I received 4 pages with comments, one page with (a part of) the article and my printer ended with the almost empty title page. The article itself should me around 5 pages long, but I only received the first page. Internet Explorer understands what should be printed.

Irritation #3: Useless navigation

A printed version of an article doesn’t need any form of navigation. Many print versions of articles however do place the navigation on the paper. A few days ago, I printed an article of a Duth online marketing blog. The article had a length of about 2 pages (including comments) but my printer printed 7 pages consisting:

• Top navigation
• Last reaction on the entire site
• Some statistics
• A little bit of whitespace
• A long list of tags
• The article itself
• The comments
• Links to not related article on other sites

We know that important content should be placed above the fold. It’s weird that it seems that this doesn’t apply for print pages based on the history of the term ‘above the fold’.
Some articles say that it’s a bad user experience if a print version has a different layout than the normal webpage. I don’t agree with them. People print an article to read the stuff and not to study the navigation.
Most advertisements don’t have any value on a print page. The only work for branding but people can’t click on them. An advertisements for a new cartridge with a short URL might be a good idea though.

Irritation #4: Non-readable URLs

How do you tackle links on a print page? Most print versions underline the link but it’s still not possible to read the underlying URL. SitePoint uses an elegant solution. They use footprints in their print versions so the URL of a link is placed in a list below the document.

Best practices

What is the way to go with print pages? Let me give my few cents about this one:

• Use a media=”print” CSS
• Delete all navigation and banners
• Use the entire paper
• Place URLs in a footprint
• Test the print version in the most important browsers