“Congratulations!  That sounds so interesting!  So…what is it, exactly?”

When I hit the family calling tree to tell them about my new job doing Search Engine Optimization here at First Scribe, that was pretty much the stock response.

My family is a fairly web savvy group.  We correspond via email on a daily basis.  We talk on Skype.  When my dad dropped Tom Brady the week before he threw six TD passes in one game, there was no shortage of activity on our fantasy football league’s message board.  The basics, really.

But despite a strong showing in general Internet knowledge, Search Engine Optimization wasn’t really on anyone’s radar.  They had all heard of it, but nobody could really define it, not even me.   I had the general idea of course, but I pretty much stuck with, “I’ll be optimizing web sites for search engines.”

A couple weeks into my SEO crash course, one thing has become very clear: it can’t really be defined, because the steps you can take to optimize a web site are infinite.

In a nutshell, there are two key concepts in SEO.

It’s more than keywords in a meta tag.

A lot more.  When the Internet really started to take off in the late ‘90s, there were a few search engines that sort of gave you results.  For a lot of web sites, optimization essentially meant plugging a few key phrases into your header and waiting (forever) for Yahoo to approve your directory submission.

These days, those tasks are at the very bottom of the SEO checklist.  It’s not just relevant content, it’s how that content is set up.  It’s not just incoming links, it’s how those links are set up and where they’re coming from.  It’s endless, and just when you think you’ve got it figured out, the rules change and you need to figure it out all over again.

The job is never done.

You can put all the pieces in place and have a web site that ranks at the top of the search engines, but it’s not going to stay there without a little work.  The Internet is not a static world.  It’s constantly changing and the only way to keep up with the game is to follow suit and change with it.

There’s a lot to it all, but there should be.  There isn’t a magic piece of code you can hide in your web site to make it jump to the top, and there shouldn’t be.  Search engines give us useful results because you can’t just wish your way to the top.

But with a little work, you can be your own fairy godmother and grant that wish yourself.

In the overly saturated online marketplace, a wide-range of companies have turned to SEO, third-party social marketing, and other strategies to generate both short-term and long-term gains in sales, contacts, traffic, and brand recognition.  But while these approaches provide a lot of value when it comes to selling tangible goods and services online, the flip-side of the coin shows that in the ad-driven world of online publishing and content syndication, high placement in the search engines and a large volume of traffic are no guarantee of monetary success or brand extension.

As was mentioned in our previous write-up about Google’s expansion into browser-based games, there is a certain value associated with visits and time spent per visit, especially when a site is centered first and foremost on content. In an industry that still views impressions and click-thrus as reliable measuring sticks for success, a number of Web consultants make the critical mistake of overlooking the long-term implications of these two metrics.  But they are vitally important when looking at the current health and future trajectory of a website’s ad revenue and future brand potential.

While great content can drive visitors in by the tens or hundreds of thousands, an unfortunate and often unspoken fact is that first-time visitors are incredibly fickle and they rarely, if ever, make content creators any money. Traditional click-thru-based ads aren’t converted on in sufficient numbers and impression-based ads are often priced in the lowest tiers.  The key is to get these users to come back, again and again.  But retaining visitors over an extended period of time is getting more difficult as the amount of competition continues to increase.

In a medium where content consumption is done quickly and with little regard for the original producer or originating brand, the challenge involved in increasing on-site loyalty and exposure can seem monumental.  One solution that has been gaining in popularity is the promotion of active participation among a site’s regulars; allow the users to submit, create, edit, vet, and manage some if not all of the content. Naturally, this has been done famously by Wikipedia as a non-profit venture, but there are others in the marketplace who are attempting to further flesh out the collaborative process in the hope of making an honest dime.

One example of this is the Whiskey Media network.  Founded by CNET co-founder and former CEO, Shelby Bonnie, the Whiskey Media network combines a traditional editorial system with a collaborative wiki-like back-end system. Their content creation process leans heavily on their niche audiences; encouraging long-term participation and allowing users to proactively submit and modify existing content that both feeds into and runs alongside staff-written features. Much like the Wikipedia model, this process fosters a high level of user engagement.  As a result Whiskey Media’s properties boast not only high numbers for key metrics like monthly visitors, but also impressive figures for repeat visits, time spent on site, pages viewed, and more.

Another prominent example is the user-managed regional directory Yelp.  Like Whiskey Media, Yelp relies on its users to submit and manage a large cross-section of its available content.  With well over 12 million user-submitted reviews, event listings, and other locally-supported content, Yelp is working to become the most trusted online directory and advertising partner for local businesses.  All of this, of course, is being done for them by the site’s very active and enthusiastic users.

While it would be foolish to think that more traditional media would ever move over to a system like this, the incentive for smaller brands and upstarts to pursue this level of user feedback is quite high.  As both Yelp and Whiskey Media have quickly learned, providing users with the tools they need to stay active and engaged not only fosters a sense of ownership and brand loyalty, but it leads to the much coveted repeat visit that online media companies seek.  Given the impermanence of most online media ventures, it will be interesting to see where both of these properties are in a few years time.