To engage users, website copy must speak to readers and not at them. Include words people can relate to, and avoid jargon, business speak, and feature-driven language.
People remember much more after reading if they retrieve information about the text from memory. Quizzes are one way websites can help users remember more.
Usability studies of corporate content distributed through Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn: users like the simplicity of messages that pass into oblivion over time, but were frequently frustrated by unscannable writing, overly frequent postings, and their inability to locate companies on social networks.
Testing how well people understand a link's first 11 characters shows whether sites write for users, who typically scan rather than read lists of items.
User research finds significant deficiencies in non-profit organizations' website content, which often fails to provide the info people need to make donation decisions.
Writing for Kindle is like writing for print, the Web, and mobile devices combined; optimal usability means optimizing content for each platform's special characteristics.
Users often see online content out of context and read it with different goals than you envisioned. While you can't predict all such goals, you can plan for multiple uses of your text.
As 3 studies of journalists show, they use the Web as a major research tool, exhibit high search dominance, and are impatient with bloated sites that don't serve their needs or list a PR contact.