Last spring, when the owners of the small book store where I worked asked me to see whether I couldn’t get the store web site to do something to earn its keep, I had never heard or seen the expression “SEO.” In the intervening year, I took an unindexed web site to number two on Google, increased links from nothing to nearly 9,000 without either paid or reciprocal links, increased visitors to the site from an average of three to an average of 195 per day, brought us from a page rank of 2 to 4, and increased monthly sales from nothing in March 2007 to over $5,000 in April of 2008.

It turns out I have a knack for it.

Usually, when people asked me what I did for a living, I said, “I take care of a bookstore’s web site.” Sometimes, if I was not sure that they would know the term “web site,” I just said, “I do computer stuff.” Occasionally, if they seemed to be somewhat familiar with computers, I actually told them what I did. In all cases, the response was the same. A considering pause, followed by, “You don’t look like a computer geek.”

I don’t. I look like somebody’s mom. I am somebody’s mom. That’s how I learned about SEO, actually. As my first step toward making the web site pay for itself, I had tried to find it on Google. I’m good at search, but the site was simply invisible. I was complaining about that to my daughter while I sautéed zucchini, and the young man she had brought to dinner was, I figured, playing games on the computer nearby.

“Here’s your problem,” he said. “You’re not indexed.”

“Huh?” I cleverly riposted.

“The search engines don’t know about your web site,” the young man kindly explained. “You need to submit your site, along with a site map. Just follow the directions at Google.”

I gazed at him inquiringly, spatula in hand.

“SEO,” said the young man, whose name is Joel. “That’s what you need to look for at Google.” That was a useful suggestion.

The part about following directions at Google was not so useful. I printed out the directions and carried them around the bookstore asking everyone if they could read them, and none of us could.

Here is the first sentence: "Before you begin... The Google Sitemap Generator is a Python script that creates a sitemap for your site using the Sitemap Protocol." I knew all those words, except that I had to look up “sitemap.”

Armed with that new vocabulary, I attempted to read the sentence. The, Google, sitemap.... generator is a thing that makes something so it is going to make a sitemap, okay.... a python: large snake... script: written form of a play... protocol: specialized forms of courtesy…You see my difficulty. And that is the "before you begin." It doesn't get better from there.

Joel came to the store to borrow a book and I told him my troubles. He smiled pityingly and gave me a couple more words to work with: "link" and "keywords."I found those easier to fathom, so I worked on those things while I studied up enough to be able to read what Google had to say. In two weeks, the name of our store – there is one with this name in every state and also in Canada, since we all named our stores back before the internet – was #1 on Google when combined with any words describing our geographical area. I bribed Joel with cake every now and then to translate something for me.

I still don’t know what Joel does for a living. Computer stuff. Not SEO. At one point, he told me that SEO was “a dark art,” and that I wouldn’t be able to succeed at it. From then on, we called SEO and SEM “The Dark Art” around our house. I did workshops, sold books, read stories to children in the bookstore, and in between I spent my work days plying The Dark Art. It was very fun.

True, my employers looked at me helplessly when I said things like, “We own the page for local search!” or triumphantly announced that we had reached “average presence” at Marketleap. But they liked the way people walked into the store carrying printouts from our site, or called us saying they had found us online. I hung around the SEO blogs, quietly absorbing things. I taught myself basic HTML (or, as it is known in my circles, “that stuff you sometimes see on emails with all the pointy brackets”).

I made a blog for the store, with lesson plans each school day. The object was, of course, to lure our local teachers to our web site and thence to the store, but that blog had visitors from 93 countries last month, and new subscribers every week. I gleefully reported all the things for which the blog was at the top of Google. When it was number one for local St. Patrick’s Day party searches (I still don’t know how that happened), my colleagues found the fact amusing, but mostly they were humoring me. No matter. I continued to get a kick out of plying The Dark Art.

I read an article recently saying that a good SEO person needs skills in research, writing, and problem solving, so it is not so odd that I turned out to enjoy SEO. It is odd that I ever found out about it. I mean, you might have a natural talent for lion taming, for all you know. We rarely get the opportunity to try something entirely new to us.

Occasionally, you can read discussions among SEO professionals about whether it is glamorous to be an in-house SEO person. I don’t get that, frankly, but at the end of my year in SEO, I faced one of the drawbacks of an in-house position: the business closed. My initial reaction, of course, was that it couldn’t close – we were number two on Google! Once I got over that and recognized that the owners had a right to retire if they felt like it, I was in an odd position. I love what I do. I’m good at it. But I hadn’t the faintest idea how to go about finding a new job using my new skills. Even if I knew what plyers of The Dark Art really call themselves, I would not be welcome in that club. I am somebody’s mom. I sadly realized that I would just have to go back to the classroom, keeping my year in SEO as a bittersweet memory.

Maybe not, though. I searched for “SEO” in my community online, and found one firm. I emailed the firm, trotting out my successful numbers, and got a meeting with the CEO. He is a 23 year old boy with an engineering degree and really elegant code. There are hundreds of local business owners who have web sites that don’t pay their way. They will never look for an SEO firm, because they don’t know that term. They don’t care how elegant the web engineer’s code is, either. I pointed out to the nice young web engineer that I could go to local businesses and explain clearly to them, as a fellow businessperson, what SEO was and how it could make their worthless web sites into essential parts of their marketing strategies. I suggested that he hire me to do that. He did not do so. My friends said I should have taken cake with me to the meeting. However, he did hire me on a contract basis to help him prepare a class he is giving for the local Small Business Development Center. And I went to local businesses myself, explaining to them how The Dark Art can make their worthless web sites essential parts of their marketing strategies. So far, I have five new clients.

I may have to go back to the classroom – I have kids to feed, after all. But I may also get to continue in SEO. I hope so. I think “Plyer of the Dark Art” would look excellent on my business cards.