The prize? Your paycheck. But the rules change daily without warning. And the game play changes, too; it's dice one day, cards the next. Forget about becoming an expert -- the jackpot-winning hand you played on Tuesday will get you escorted from the table Wednesday, your pockets empty and your brain addled.

It's the SEO game -- and it's an involuntary pastime we writers (I guess we're "online content creators," now) face every time we sit down at the keyboard.

I write for True/Slant -- a growing online news and opinion network of passionate bloggers. I do it for fun (and, maybe someday, profit). I love the freedom, the creativity, the energy of being part of a community of writers dedicated to engaging their audience in a conversation about our world.

And I can't stand the crap shoot that is search engine optimization.

It feels like it should be scientific. After all, we're dealing with machines, right? Algorithms and lines of code and programming languages that don't reason, forget or need to take a bathroom break... You tell the machines what to look for and I put the right information on my blog post. If I do it right: score! If not, the mistake should be easy to find. It's science -- predictable and reliable, right?

But you can't predict which blog posts will hit -- and which won't. I've been in enough SEO seminars to know the basics: use full names and good keywords in my HTML title; write straightforward headlines with proper nouns and no abbreviations or alternate spellings; hyperlink every noun I can find in my text, etc., etc.

I try. I really do. And sometimes it actually, sort of, works.

And sometimes it doesn't. And then I see a colleague write nearly the exact same post I do (we're a group of 200+ bloggers, overlap is to be expected...) and get three times the traffic. Same topic. Same keywords. Same head banging on the keyboard.

Of course, rationally, I know SEO isn't a predictable, machine-like operation. If it were, there weren't be so many books and online seminars and SEO firms selling their knowledge and experience. If SEO was as predictable as say... the internal combustion engine or gravity, we could all just download the same five-page pamphlet with simple step-by-step instructions and go about our business.

But what would the world -- and Google -- look like if we all knew the same basic steps to search engine optimization? I mean, two teams with the exact same playbook... they both can't win the game, can they?

Which is why I'm working on an SEO conspiracy theory. It involves Google, George Soros and the Trilateral Commission. You'll know more about it just as soon as I get this canonical tagging straightened out...