If you're a writer optimizing your site for the search engines, you have more considerations than just optimizing for the search engines.

The first thing you need to do is decide if you're selling yourself, an author driven website, or selling expertise, a topic driven website.

Once you've made your decision, you'll need to do your keyword research on your topic. If you're creating an author driven website, you'll want to make sure that you include your name in your keywords.

Here are the strategies you need to implement:

1. Optimize your website. You'll need to optimize each page individually, so if you have a large list of keywords, then you can optimize each page for a different keyword phrase.

When you've finished optimizing your site, you'll need to implement your search engine strategy.

2. Submit your site to the major search engines.
Although the major search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN are more or less true search engines because they spider sites, if you're not linked to any other sites,
these search engines won't find you.

You can have other sites link to you, but the problem here is that it may take awhile for the search engines to find your site and spider it even if you are linked.

You can significantly speed up the process simply by submitting to the major search engines manually. If you use a sitemap, you can submit your sitemap to both Google and Yahoo and have your site spidered within a few days.

It may take a few months to get your site completely spidered, especially if it's a large site, but again, a sitemap can help you with this process.

3. Build backlinks to your website.
Find writing directories and other places where writers, and readers, hang out and post a link back to your site. The more links you have pointing back to your website from other relevant resources, the higher your rankings will be, and your Google page rank will be higher.

You can also find general directories to submit your website. General directories can help you with building higher page rank for your site.

4. Write articles.
Although some writers disagree with using articles as a promotion technique, claiming that you should only write articles for pay, I disagree.

When you write articles, you are giving readers a taste of your writing. You are offering value.

Articles can also help you build tons of one way backlinks to your website through article directories, as well as build a following for your writing.

Which had you rather do: get paid $25 for an article and only be paid once, or earn money every month, over and over for the same article by using it to drive traffic to your website?

5. Participate in forums and communities.
I know. This is a tough one. Many writers are introverts, or they're not interested in marketing.

If you want to sell your writing, you have to market. Although search engines can get you in front of your readers, search engines don't buy. Readers do.