While speaking at a recent Web forum in Vancouver, a web copywriter from the audience approached me with disheartening stories about how his skills were not valued at his workplace.

Part of the reason web copywriters are under-valued extends from the fact managers often get excited about new technologies. They believe employing new software and applications demonstrate they’re on the leading edge, creating an opportunity to score points with their superiors. As a result, the employees who handle design and development tend to gain more attention and recognition.

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During a meeting to discuss an upcoming project, a marketing director from a U.S. firm suggested the client would be better served investing more on print materials, including print ads and direct ad mails, versus search engine ads and search engine optimization (SEO).

While print ads and direct mail have their place in the marketing realm, Webcopyplus strongly suggested the client stay the course and focus mainly on SEO.

The client, who is introducing a new type of data storage component for computers, is targeting a broad market — virtually anyone who uses a computer.

Even if you gain access to a direct mail list of individuals who recently purchased computer products, there’s no accurate way of forecasting current or future purchases.

Meanwhile, SEO allows you to target your audience when consumers are at their peak point of interest.

That’s when they are most likely to make a purchase, which translates to high conversion rates, and your best return on investment.

Your homepage is one of the key pages on your website. It’s often the starting point for visitors and therefore viewed most often. So what should your homepage communicate?

Your homepage should:

• Introduce the purpose and scope of your website
• Set the tone and build credibility

Important homepage elements:

• Header and footer
• Logo and tagline
• Clear menu and table of contents
• Company overview
• Key benefits you offer
• News, events and announcements

Like other pages, keep the design and messages simple, and use small images so the homepage loads quickly. Also, use direct, simple sentences.

Every slight improvement to your homepage’s web content will help you create a good first — and lasting — impression.

While discussing a client’s project, one of the web copywriters at Webcopyplus suggested breaking up web content does a lot more than promote scanability.

It started a discussion about the additional benefits of segmenting web content into digestible chunks. Here’s what we came up with.

One-topic sentences and paragraphs help web copywriters:

• Deliver scannable web content
• Layer information (small blocks of text can link to other blocks)
• Organize information effectively (easy to arrange and view)
• Join similar topics
• Provide content that’s easier to remember
• Reduce or eliminate scrolling

Concise web content doesn’t just happen. You need to plan your topics and approach. And once you complete the initial draft, keep cutting away all those dead words!

The extra time you spend or invest in your web content will help ensure your online guests enjoy their stay, complete their tasks and keep coming back for more.

The New Yorker recently featured “Out of print: The death and life of the American newspaper.”

Journalist Eric Alterman speaks of the Internet’s rise, and how it’s made newspapers seem “slow and unresponsive.” Plus, the dawn of websites like Craigslist is killing print classified advertising.

The outcome, according to media entrepreneur Alan Mutter, is that independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost 42 per cent of their market value in the past three years alone.

“Until recently, newspapers were accustomed to operating as high-margin monopolies,” wrote Alterman. “To own the dominant, or only, newspaper in a mid-sized American city was, for many decades, a kind of license to print money.”

Meanwhile, eMarketer reported more than $8.6 billion was spent on search engine advertising in 2007, an amount that could reach $16.6 billion in 2011.

It gives the impression it’s just a matter of a few years before newspapers become obsolete.

More than 88% of Internet users believe they are served poor content on the Web, according to an online poll conducted by Webcopyplus.

When asked to rate the overall quality of content on the Web, poll respondents selected the following options:

1. Poor 88.5%
2. Satisfactory 9.8%
3. Good 1.5%
4. Excellent 0.2%

A total of 480 Internet users participated in the web writing firm’s online poll during a four-month period that ended in April of 2008.

Subsequent interviews with web users revealed multiple common concerns, including:

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A total of 480 Internet users who participated in a recent Webcopyplus poll rated the overall quality of web content, and the marks are less that stellar. In fact, more than 88% of the online poll respondents believe they are served “poor” content on the Web.

Additionally, subsequent interviews with web users revealed numerous common concerns.

Read the full story: Poll: Web Delivers Poor Content.

Clients are regularly surprised to find out the web copywriters at Webcopyplus aim to deliver web content at a grade 8 language level.

The reasons are many: to promote readability, scanability and usability. Simple connects. You decrease the chances of alienating your audience.

While there are exceptions, most target audiences will have varied expertise, in both the Internet and subject matter. A Web or subject expert can endure simplicity, but a novice might not be able to identify with or comprehend complex information.

If your business needs to communicate complicated information, an effective solution is to layer various degrees of details through links. That way, when necessary, your visitors can drill down and get the finer points.

In any case, web copywriters should always go out of their way to keep web content clear, concise and easy to read. Simple web content translates to more connections and higher conversion rates.

The competition is intense, but Google still dominates the search engine market, drawing far more search users, requests and ad revenues than all its rivals put together, reported eMarketer.

The New York-based research firm estimates that Google raked in 75% of US paid search advertising in 2007, up from 60 per cent in 2006. Number two, Yahoo, collected a mere nine per cent share, while all others divided 16% of the leftovers.

But with over $8.6 billion going to search engine advertising in 2007, that 16% stake still equals nearly $1.4 billion, noted eMakreter. And with search spending expected to nearly double to almost $16.6 billion in 2011, even a small piece of the pie represents serious revenue.

While growth of the US online population has slowed in recent years (projected to be 3.1 per cent in 2008), the number of the nation’s Internet users will reach nearly 200 million in 2008.

That’s according to eMarketer, which analyzes Internet information from more than 3,000 sources.

The Internet research firm also reports Internet usage in the US is becoming a daily habit. Moreover, it reports US Internet users spent 15.3 hours a week online last year.

eMarketer also projects that this year there will be 193.9 million US Internet users — two-thirds of the population. By 2012, 217 million Americans will be online, it reported.

Meanwhile, Internet World Stats, which utilizes data from Nielsen, ITU and other reliable sources, reports 215 million Americans already use the Internet — 71.4% of the US population.

In either case, those are huge numbers and worth tapping into — regardless what business you’re in.