Writing for a website is not exactly the type of writing that most of us learned in high school. There are some important differences to understand before beginning writing for a website. The most important to remember is that while you are writing for an actual reader, you are also writing for Google or another search engine. This is roughly what is meant by SEO, or search engine optimization. In addition to how you write for a site, how the site is created and labeled is equally important.

When content, or articles, are uploaded onto a website, Google has something called spiders, which are programs that analyze the content looking for certain words and phrases which it then uses to index the site. Ever wonder why when you search for "Labrador retrievers" that only pages with that term are returned? It is because Google has located and indexed the sites with the most references to that term.

As a writer or web developer, you want to make sure that your content is on target to the overall direction of the site. For example, if the site is all about Labrador retrievers, then an article on Jack Russell terriers won’t do any good for the overall rankings of the site. And in the Google ranking game, it is all about the rankings.

SEO is not just about writing articles, it is also about organization and labeling. Photos also can be optimized to increase ranking and will please the spiders. It is a good idea, and a staple of SEO to label photos with a keyword that you have targeted. For example, an unlabeled photo is generally given a name by the computer such as DSC00034.jpg. A name like this will not help the site at all. However, taking a few seconds to rename the photo "Labrador retriever running" will show up as an instance of the keyword and will improve the ranking.

Finally, when including photos on the site, it is important to optimize them not only for keywords, but for size and quality as well. We all enjoy looking at a beautiful image in high definition, but Google’s spiders do not. Photoshop, Corel, or other image editing software can help resize and optimize images so that they can help you site look beautiful, not only to the people who visit, but to the Google spiders that will analyze it.

There is much more to SEO that this, but these are just a few simple things that can be done to improve a site’s ranking for the search engines.