I have been asked to write about SEO. This is quite funny on the face of it, because two months ago I did not even know what the expression meant.

Here's how I found out. It was early March and I had been detailed to try to get the store website active. The website, hosted by our catalog company, had been up for a year but we had made no effort with it and had only a couple of orders in that year. I quickly discovered that, with the best will in the world, people who did not memorize our lengthy and unmemorable URL could not find our store online. I typed in everything a reasonable person might use to look for us, and we just weren't there, not even on page 5, let alone on the first few pages where a reasonable person might click. This seemed like a serious problem.

So Arkenboy was over at the house one evening, and my daughter remarked that he knew stuff about computers. I described my dilemma. So he went over to the computer and fooled around a little while I was sauteeing something and complaining to said daughter that I couldn't even find a book on the subject, and Arkenboy called out, "SEO."

To which I responded "huh?" with the quick wit for which I am known, and he said, "SEO is what you need to google to find out about this." He then remarked that Google was only even aware of the front page of our website, something he had easily discovered while we were talking. He then told me to construct a site map and submit it to Google according to the instructions in the webmaster tools, and accepted another glass of wine.

Now I said that I was an odd person to ask on the face of it, but sometimes it is good to ask a person who knows only a little more than you do. Because the thing about asking people who really know stuff  is that their answers may be above your head.

Actually, the remark about SEO was extremely useful, because I was then able to learn all sorts of things about Search Engine Optimization, which is the general term for all the stuff you do to make the search engines notice that your website is there.

(You know how Google and MSN and all those guys show up in the footprints at your xanga? That means that they know you are here, and are crawling around looking for words that give hints as to what you are talking about, so that they can help someone find you or something like you.)

But the whole "follow the directions at Google" part was flawed, because I couldn't understand them at all.

I printed out the directions and carried them around the store 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 know all those words, except that I had to look up sitemap, which is a list of all the locations at your website. Knowing that, 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...

You see my difficulty. Even now, I have only the vaguest idea of what a Python script could conceivably be, never mind what it is.

And that is the "before you begin." It doesn't get better from there.

Arkenboy came to the store to borrow a book and I told him my troubles. He gave me a couple more words to work with: "link" and "keywords."

To put it in normal English, the search engines like your website better if a) there are words in it that people usually look for when searching for your stuff, and b) a lot of other places link to you.

Having a large vocabulary is not a plus here. Your website's words, and especially the part that the computer is just telling to the search engine computers (you can see it by doing a command like "view code," depending on your computer) should be the things people are actually looking for. So if you are selling aprons, you should have the word "apron" there, not things like "This saucy number is reminiscent of the Belle Epoque."

So we fixed that up. It was just a matter of changing the words, or in our case, asking the website's webmaster to change the words for us.

Then you have to get links. This is called a "link management campaign." The object is to get other websites to link to you. There are two main ways to accomplish this (actually, you can pay for it, but we didn't try that, so I can't speak of it):

First, you can have good content so that people are moved to link to you. I didn't have that option so much, because I have little control over my website. Sometimes I wander around the FAQs over there, thinking that I might find some hitherto-unnoticed option that will let me put in articles or something, but it hasn't happened yet. I did, however, get the nice webmaster to link to a blog from the website, and have been spending a lot of hours for the past couple of months making it as good a blog as I possibly can.

Other things you can do, and which I plan to do when I have time, are to go around commenting and leaving your URL in online communities where your customers might go, and to write articles with your URL on them for the sites that give out free articles to folks who can't necessarily write but do know how to add content to their websites.  I bet there are more, too. If you know of others, let me know.

The second way to get links is to ask for them. If you are a retailer, then you can go to all your vendors and ask for links. You can also register at all the online directories you can find, and you can go to folks who share your target audience and offer to swap links. This is easy, though time-consuming. I have read that you ought to spend a couple of hours every day doing this, and I do as much of it as I can fit in.

So this is what I have done. In January, our website had a grand total of 73 visits in the whole month, and we now get 20+ per day, so that has clearly improved. Precisely one of those January visits came through a search engine, compared with about a third of the visits now (the rest come from the blog and from people who actually type in the address on purpose). And of course we went from invisible-to-Google to the front page in two months. So I think that it works.

20+ visits per day is not so good, let's admit it. The store blog gets about 1000 visits per week, and that isn't all that good, even. I think you have to get 500 a day to expect to be lucrative as a business. I don't want you to have a false idea of my success, here. But The Wall Street Journal said, "propelling a site from No.10 to No. 1 in the search rankings may be a lot easier than moving it from No. 10,000 to No.10," so I am feeling fairly optimistic.

They also said that people who do SEO for a living charge $2,500 to $10,000 for an initial effort, and $750 to $5,000 a month for continuing efforts, so it sure is worth doing it yourself.

I spend an hour or two a day on the store blog and another couple of hours on the links management part. The rest of my work time is spent on non-internet marketing, including workshops, conferences, shows, visits to our school customers, plus of course a couple of days in the store. I also have e-mail, research, clerical tasks, and meetings. Presumably, if you spent 8 hours a day on links management, the process would go faster.

However, I have no idea whether I have been very successful or not very successful. I don't know whether a ten-fold improvement in traffic in two months is good or not, and I don't know how much longer it will be before we see lots of orders from that traffic. This is normally our slow time of the year, so I may just be planting the seeds right now, for an enormous crop of orders during Back -to-School. On the othe hand, it may be that a good SEO campaign generally doubles orders in a couple of weeks, and I am not succeeding at all. I feel as though I am doing this in a vacuum, frankly, so if those of you who asked would like to share your own e-commerce experiences, I would appreciate it.

I may have hit bottom completely.

I called someone "Missy" in bell choir practice last night. "As I understand it," I said when she complained that she hadn't had enough chance to practice the music, "you've been playing bells since third grade. So let's hear no more of that, Missy!"

I am still abysmally bad at the bells. The director stands by me and says "A-onie and a-twoie and a DOTTED QUARTER NOTE AND!" and things like that, and yet I rarely ring my bell at the right time. When occasionally I do (basically on sections where I have memorized the tune), I get a bit of a thrill. But you really can't play bells by ear, so I stare grimly at the music, trying to count it accurately, even as my eyes go "Yep, just basses in the next three measures" and run ahead to the next bit where I come in. My eyes haven't gotten the word that I am not singing.

I might learn to read music better from this experience, though. If I could just look at the music and see that we were back at the "onie and a-twoie" section rather than having to think "one two three four" through eight measures in which I don't ring, I would not be thinking we were on measure 54 when we were really on 56.

After that, I worked with the kids' music a bit. We're doing a youth choir for the summer, and I am looking forward to working with them. "They're really into your vocal exercises," said my partner in this venture. That may be the first use of that sentence ever.

And then of course was my own choir practice. We are doing a campy version of "America the Beautiful" for Memorial Day. It simply cries out for girls with feathers, a la Busby Berkeley, though the director thought fireworks would do it.

I also went to the hour-long Pilates class at the gym yesterday, and of course worked -- links management, workshop preparation, flyers, stuff like that. That Man gave me an article on increasing your website traffic from The Wall Street Journal. I was glad to see that I was doing all the stuff they suggested, and startled at the prices people charge to do those things. Of course, I do them with a low level of skill. But I think I need to make much fancier cakes for Arkenboy, the fellow who taught me the term "SEO."

I was updating my state history for middle school workshop to mesh with the new social studies standards and found that the middle school now has an extremely odd set of requirements for state history. Civil rights and natural disasters, basically. 5th grade does the Civil War and 8th grade does a full semester course on state history, so 6th and 7th get Japanese-American internment and acid rain. Interesting topics, certainly, but it's hard to imagine it as a really fun workshop, or even a cohesive one. We'll see what I can come up with. I like challenges.

But with one thing and another, I didn't actually cast on for a new project, just swatched.

Yes, well, admittedly what we have here is two rows of knitting, so it doesn't yet count as a swatch.  But along here pretty soon I'll find a good gauge for this stuff and then I can find a suitable pattern.

This is Plymouth Stone Cotton, which I bought for the Nothing But a T-Shirt pattern a couple of years ago. I ended up making it in Sinfonia, which was pretty enough in the skein, but met all my worst fears in the actual garment -- belling, clinging, refusing to hold its shape, looking uneven....

I've made several successful cotton garments since then, but I still don't fully trust the stuff. If you have experience with this yarn and want to offer me some warnings or reassurances, I'll be glad of it.

Here I am, through with the Bijoux Blouse, and yet I haven't begun another knitting project. True, I have Erin on the needles, and I am quilting the Provencal table runner, but normally you finish one project and start another, right?

But I realized that my approach to the whole stash and WIPs thing is different from that of a lot of knitters here in blogland.

Until last year, I never even had a stash. I had the yarn for my current project, and toward the end of that I would begin looking for the yarn for my next project, but I was really never more than one project ahead. Now I have enough yarn for half a dozen projects.

I didn't sew enough to buy fabric, but then I started the SWAP and bought as much of the planned fabric ahead as possible, so I now have something of a fabric stash as well.

I never had more than two WIPs in those days, either, but now I have several.

All these things nag at me. Other knitting bloggers enjoy their stashes and WIPs enough to post lists of them and unending pictures of yarn (I have neve seen the charm of the pictures of yarn, I'm afraid), but I don't enjoy having mine. They make me feel as though I am running behind.

I have realized the difference. To the other folks, stashes and WIPs are wealth. To me, they are a to-do list.

I have enough sock yarn for three pairs of socks right now, which I probably won't knit till August or Socktober. So I have "knit russet socks" and "knit gray socks" on my back-of-the-mind to-do list for months. I don't like that. You know, if you read this blog much, how I get about deadlines. If I am going to do something, I like to get right in there and do it.

So for me, those two lengths of Tencel I have sitting by my sewing machine waiting for me to make them into trousers are Unfinished Tasks.

When I consider what to begin knitting now for my Zombie Project, I hear all this buzzing from the WIPs -- the table runner, Erin, the bed quilt I pieced last year and haven't quilted yet, the jacket of lilac linen. "How can you knit a zombie project," they nag, "when we aren't finished yet?'

But I can't do any of those things while I read, so quite a bit of potential knitting time is being wasted while I read.

I am not this way about books. At the moment, I have a stack of unread books, also an unusual circumstance for me, and it makes me feel downright cozy to think that I won't run out of things to read. They feel like wealth.

So I figure that I can, if I try, start thinking of my shawl yarn not as an unfinished shawl, but as wealth. That batik print that is slated to become a tunic? Wealth.

This may require some practice. But I will cast on a new Zombie Project today.

"So," said #2 son, "how do you like basically being a house-mom?"

I think it was some sort of collision between "housewife" and "mom." I protested.

"Oh, I know you're working," he agreed, "but you're able to manage your time more efficiently and make us cookies more often."

Making (and, let's admit it) eating cookies more often isn't one of my life goals, so I let that pass.

However, I am enjoying working at home.

Yesterday, for example, I spent a number of hours working on the links management campaign, an intrinsically dull task. I also did some research for a new workshop we're putting together, and the monthly e-message (can't really call it a newsletter, though it is standing in for one until we decide how we want to approach that), and some other similarly fascinating stuff.

But I did it barefoot, with an excellent view of the lovely spring day, and the breeze coming through the lace curtains at the window, and nothing but birdsong interrupting my work.

Since I continue to spend a couple of days every week working away from home, I have had no opportunity to feel isolated or bored with being at home, and the whole arrangement continues to seem excellent.

That was April. May might also be like that. June will include ten workshops, and there will be boys in the house all day interfering with my work by, I suppose, asking for cookies. In July and August I will have to commute to the store daily (long-time readers with total recall will know that August in the month when my blog becomes nothing but an ongoing whine about how overworked I am) and do all my computer work under conditions of intense stress. Or early in the morning before I go to the store. That would also work.

But May! In May, the region where I live is like paradise. My boys will be in school all month. I expect visits from both my daughters this month, and #1 son is graduating. I am back in good health, I have returned to the gym, I have nothing on my calendar but parties and music and similar jollity.

I have high hopes for May.

Today I will be at the store, doing the beginning-of-the-month jobs, so I had better get going. Exercise, the rest of the essential daily computer work -- that will fill the available time before I leave. No cookies today, that's for sure.