Many people feel uncertain when dealing with copywriters. Like any artform, writing is subjective; instead of black and white, most business owners and marketing managers see indistinguishable shades of grey. But copywriting possesses one key element that most other forms of art don’t – a commercial imperative.

Because copywriter’s audience is driven by realities of business market, so too is copywriter. Although good ones love to write, they don’t necessarily love to write about toilet paper and real-estate. Copywriters – in particular website copywriters – write because it’s their job. And like any job, copywriting has very defined objectives and parameters which determine how copywriter works, and kind of material they produce.

So, if you need black and white, this is where you’ll find it.

There are two primary commercial realities for a website copywriter. Understand these realities, and you’ll understand writer. Ignore them, and your job will take longer, be more frustrating, be less engaging, and earn you less money.

REALITY 1 – READER-FRIENDLY AND SEARCH-ENGINE-FRIENDLY A website copywriter needs to adhere to certain guidelines to ensure your website is both reader-friendly and search-engine-friendly. This is black and white.

Because most websites rely on search engines for their traffic, your website copywriter has to write for two broad audiences: human and computer. This introduces a number of complexities because, quite often, these audiences want different things.

For instance, with humans, less is generally more. But with computers, more is more. Humans need to understand, so fewer words better. Search engines, on other hand, are programmed to think that anything important enough to be ranked highly has to have a lot of words. A website copywriter must balance these conflicting requirements. Your copywriter will work faster and more efficiently if you don’t demand too few words or too many.

TIP: If your site needs both humans and search engines, try not to set your heart on less than 100 words per page or more than 300 words. Generally speaking, somewhere in middle is a nice compromise for both audiences.

1. Do you recognize press, university, writing center, magazine, literary review, etc. that is sponsoring contest? Do your writing friends and teachers know about it? (A number of Internet boards post warnings about “scam” contests—it can’t hurt to check those out.) Is administering organization one you’d be happy to have publish your work?

2. Does competition post names of past winners (and titles of their winning works)? Can you locate published stories, poems, essays, or books?