Above all, the search engines love high-quality writing. The folks at Google explicitly state that their goal is to connect users with “useful, information-rich site(s)” containing pages that “clearly and accurately describe your content.” And, in fact, most of the advancements in search over the last decade have been aimed toward teaching machines how to filter useful and lucid prose from advertising and opportunistic Net crud.

Writers and editors should occasionally remind themselves of this. And they should also remember that the Internet was specifically designed for writing — not apps, photos, video, advertising or tools. No matter how we’ve shoehorned other things into it, HTML isn’t a programming language, or even a design tool. HTML is a way of marking up text to convey syntax. It’s nearest relative is typesetting annotations and works best for everyone when it is used accordingly.

If that’s true, then why is search engine optimization important?