Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a service you can buy to boost your website's position on the search engine results page, when Internet surfers try to find certain keywords or phrases, like "Mesa Giant Red Nipple." If you plug that four-word phrase into any of the top web search engines, my site will come out pretty darn near the top. In cyberspace, I am considered to be *the* expert on Mesa Giant Red Nipples, and I've worked very hard to cultivate that reputation.

I've posted at least half a dozen articles on the subject. I've created a couple of blogs that mirror the phrase and link back to my website. I've done some social bookmarking on sites with memorable names like del.icio.us. Or is it deli.cio.us? I can never remember.

If I were really serious about maintaining my Number One ranking, I would hire a squad of Bulgarians and Pakistanis, at ten cents an hour, to find blog comment discussions or other online forums with some "relevancy." For a keyword phrase like "Mesa Giant Red Nipple," they would probably come up with sites showing the difference between a mesa and a butte, or raving about NY Giants football, or offering Simply Red concert photos, or selling breast augmentation and nipple piercing services.

Or they might be less relevant.

Then I would tell the Bulgarians and Pakistanis to write comments and drop links on those blogs or forums, cleverly disguised to blend into the existing conversational threads: "I make plenty big touchdown in my socker game less week. -Rogger, Mesa Giant Red Nipple [link]."

Or maybe I would hire Lithuanians and Vietnamese to do this part of the job. Everyone knows those darn Pakistanis can't blend in anywhere.

But perhaps you're pressed for time and have too much money to worry about small matters like SEO. That's when you go out and hire an SEO firm. They also list themselves under acronyms like SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and SES (Search Engine Strategists). If you don't know anything about hiring an SEO company, here's a list of pointers:

(1) The SEO CEO (Chief Executive Officer) must be able to dazzle you with dialect and baffle you with bullpucky. If he doesn't use jargon like "keyword density" and "backlink boosting," he doesn't know his stuff. On the other hand, if he can rattle off five or six sentences in a slangy SEO-ese lingo, and those sentences make no sense to you at all, he's probably the guy you want.

(2) Most of his staff should be in their early twenties. The younger, the better. In fact, if the CEO is older than 29, he probably hasn't been immersed in cyberspace for more than half his life, so his genetic sequencing hasn't mutated enough to provide the kind of service you need.

(3) Your SEO CEO should assure you that he performs only "ethical" or "organic" or "white hat" SEO. He should also warn you that his competitors engage in "black hat" SEO, and their efforts often result in search engine penalties. He should tell you that if you use those other guys, your site might end up getting banned by Google. He should really scare you. If you're not terrified, he's no freakin' good.

(4) He should offer to research the precise keyword phrases that people customarily use to find your business. Then he should propose "optimizing" your website for those keywords. "Optimizing" is techspeak for "charging exorbitant fees to insert one of your keyword phrases into each paragraph on your site."

(5) By the way, you can discover the same keyword phrases by casually perusing the free server logs provided by your website's hosting company.

(6) At this point, your SEO CEO should offer to sell you custom-written keyword-rich articles that link back to your website. He will tell you he's placing those articles on websites in his inventory that have been carefully selected for their "relevancy." Think nipple piercing.

(7) He should never characterize his inventory websites as "link farms." Even though they are, in truth, link farms.

(8) For the coup de grâce, he will carefully gauge your GQ (Gullibility Quotient), and perhaps offer to sell you "backlink boosting." Make sure to ask whether he uses Pakistanis or Lithuanians.

***

The SEO industry came into being approximately ten seconds after Google announced its PageRank system. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, says that "PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of measuring its relative importance within the set."

How much do you wanna bet that some hotshot SEO CEO wrote that sentence?

PageRank (PR) tells me your website's relative importance. If you're PR 1 or 2, I can't even risk being seen with you. But if you're PR 8 or 9, I will anxiously wait by the phone, hoping to be invited to your next party.

SEOers rely on PageRank like the rest of us rely on air. In fact, your average SEOer keeps a wary eye on everything that Google does, because Google created--and can easily destroy--his business. When giant Google takes a crap, every SEOer minutely examines the steaming heap.

But some SEOers want to be ahead of the curve, so they don't wait until the golden turds hit the ground. They jump up, trying to get a view inside Google's butt. They want to know how the digestive system works. The express concern when Google experiences constipation. They offer suppositories for the occasional hemorrhoid. They break out their umbrellas when Google has diarrhea.

Every time Google pitches a puny pebble into the placid pond of SEO, the ensuing ripples can seem like tidal waves to an SEO CEO. If Google makes a tiny adjustment to the way it does business, a complacent SEOer might go bankrupt. To provide an extra security blanket, there's a whole additional layer of SEO practitioners, the SEO Consultants. An SEOcon makes his living by watching Google closely, while analyzing the speeches, blogs, and public pronouncements of Google insiders. The SEOcon then sells his analyses to other SEO geeks via pricey newsletters and books. Some of those books sell for many hundreds of dollars. Good bullpucky ain't cheap.

***

So the primary objective in SEO today is to figure out what Google is thinking and how it operates. Some companies try to discover how a competitor's widget works through reverse engineering. They take apart the widget and analyze its technological principles, attempting to duplicate its function without infringing any copyrights. Some companies turn computer hackers loose on a competitor's system, to discover vulnerabilities they can exploit.

And some companies try to hack Google.

Most reputable firms want to avoid, as much as possible, paying for ads on search engine results pages. They want their websites to appear near the top of those results pages in a natural way... "organically." But good "organic" search results are not as chock-full of healthy goodness as the word might imply. To get a high organic ranking, companies usually try to spam the search engines. They pay an SEOer to put their spammy "keyword-rich" pages on inventory websites. They pay the SEOer to hire spam-generating Pakistanis. They pay the SEOer for "backlink boosting."

By the way, doesn't "Backlink Boosting" sound like a great title for gay porn?