How Did You Get Started in SEO?

A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about how I got started in the SEO field and my mind started to wander (as it does a lot…) and I recalled hearing different stories from other people over the years about how they got started.  Each one was always fascinating to me.  Nobody that I have ever talked to has ever had the same story and that’s one of the beauties of the Internet marketing industry.  There doesn’t have to be a clear path.  People from all walks of life can make it.  It just takes brains, creativity and dedication.

So I decided to reach out to a bunch of Search Engine Optimizers that I respect.  I wanted it to be a good cross-section of people.  So I talked to in-house SEOs, small business owners, industry stalwarts, SEOs from all over the world, large agencies, small boutiques.   I asked each of them ONE simple question: “How did you get started in SEO?”

This will be the first part of a new monthly series here at BlueGlass called “How did you get started?”.  I am going to talk to people from all of the different niches that make up this wonderful Internet marketing community of ours.  I hope you get as much out of it as I do.  I also hope that you will share your stories with us in the comments below.  The more we know about each other, the better!

Use the links below to jump directly to someone’s story or simply read the whole thing at your leisure!

• Aaron Chronister
• Aaron Wall
• Adam Audette
• Danny Sullivan
• Dave Naylor
• Debra Mastaler
• Jill Whalen
• John Andrews
• Joost de Valk
• Loren Baker
• Marcus Tandler
• Marshall Simmonds
• Melanie Mitchell
• Dr. Michael Dorausch
• Patrick Altoft
• Rae Hoffman
• Rand Fishkin

I specialize in SEO with the majority of my experience on the enterprise level. I currently work as an in-house SEO for a Ticket Broker and have started several of my own companies generating income from a variety of methods. I created the rarely discussed Bacon Explosion and the BBQ Addicts site on which it resides (due to threats suggestions from Rae Hoffman… thank you Rae).

I try to do as many different things as I can to broaden my knowledge base so I run affiliate sites, online retail stores, sites devoted to advertising, blogs, paid forums, email marketing, and my most recently launched company is going to be a local deal that specializes in customized music management in Kansas City. I also am very interested in getting into the startup world and am hitting as many of those events as I can. I cook competition BBQ and enjoy long walks… I mean sitting on the beach and drinking beer.

Early 2001 is when I began my journey into this chaos. I imagine many of us started like I did at this early stage. At the time I was working at a major telecommunications firm in Kansas City supporting a sales team on installations of high capacity broadband switches for T-1 up to OC-3 lines.

A co-workers sister was trying to jump into selling her handmade vintage purses online (yes, my first SEO gig was in purses on a site called Girly Girl Vintage). I built her website and she was happy with it so I assumed my job there was done. A few months later she asked “Why don’t I show up in Yahoo?”

I was very intrigued with that question so I started digging and as with nearly everything else I do, trial, error, and tests! I scoured forums (mostly Webmaster World back then) and started testing things out. I built out a few of my own sites to test and quickly realized how easy it was (which also began my interest in spam automation, but that’s another story). I completely redesigned her website, and a couple months later I was hooked! Although I stopped working with her after that, she has been successful and now has 3 brick and mortar locations locally and still does some online business (site now is a mess, I need to call her). I always give her the credit for starting my career in SEO (so thank you Kim if you’re reading this).

And I better not hear any crap about from anyone about the purse thing.

Aaron Wall founded SeoBook.com in 2003 and has worked over 20,000 hours in the SEO field. His site is known for its popular online SEO training program and the SEO tools they offer. He has consulted for small mom & pop businesses right on through to fortune 500 projects. He also runs a bunch of sites that are not in the SEO space.

I was in the military and loathed the lifestyle. On the submarine you could go month(s) without daylight and basically every aspect of your life was managed in ways that were arbitrary, illogical, and flat out stupid. One such example would be how they would allow oxygen to run a bit low out of spec & then disallow you from exercising because they feared running the oxygen scrubbers a bit more would create too much noise. Then the next day would be “field day” – a 4-hour clean up day where they would crank up the oxygen level & instruct you to use an industrial strength vacuum cleaner which was shorting the sound to the hull.

There were tons of other such examples, like on one underway when they lost all my stuff in Puerto Rico (offloaded it with the SEALs) & forced me to re-buy a full set of uniforms. On that same underway I came back to get told that my car was towed off base (into a ghetto, where it was broke into & I had more stuff stolen). The people who told me my car got towed told me it happened a while ago and that it would cost me a lot, while laughing at me. If you have ever watched the movie “Falling Down” that really encapsulated how I felt at that point in time. On that underway my pre-tax income was less than what the military cost me in lost or stolen goods tied directly to their incompetence. So they charged me to steal a few months of my life & I really hated everything about the military lifestyle from that point onward. When I got out of the military my first website was an ugly looking rant site about my loathe of the navy…followed quickly by a low quality affiliate website (hey, when a person is new, naive, and ignorant they often think their stuff is more brilliant than it is).

I tried to hire a person to do SEO for that affiliate site & of course nobody who was of any quality would want to work for dirt-cheap on a crappy thin affiliate website (if they were smart they would have built a better one themselves). The person I hired failed & so that was no good. That company is still selling garbage SEO packages to this day.

I was also testing buying traffic from a variety of sources & affiliate commissions were always more common from search traffic stuff. That (and a bit of common sense) told me that search traffic was valuable, but I didn’t have much money to invest (actually I was in debt & even had credit card debt…the perfect recipe for failure). But I worked long and hard & it was off to the races with learning SEO. I owe a ton to the folks at the former SearchGuild website (Chris, Brad, Denise, Lots0, etc.) for taking me under their wings & teaching me well. I also went to SES Boston that first year, with Danny Sullivan being super awesome and giving me a pass for stuffing bags & handing out tags and such. My first website about SEO was the terrible domain name search-marketing.info. Toward the end of 2003 I wrote an article that spread about the Google Florida update & I launched SeoBook.com in December.

Adam is president and CEO of SEO agency AudetteMedia, where he is responsible for the strategic direction of the company. Adam heads the development of partnerships, technology and business development opportunities, while overseeing high-level strategy. As one of the industry’s foremost boutique SEO agencies, AudetteMedia has partnered with premier brands including Zappos, Gannett, Kroger, HSN, Charming Shoppes, University of Phoenix, Amazon, Michelin and many others.

Adam has been active in the search marketing industry since 1996 and is a highly rated speaker at premier industry events including SMX and SMX Advanced, Searchfest, SES, BlueGlass, and Pubcon. He contributes regular columns for Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch, and has served as technical editor for Wiley/Sybex publications such as, “SEO: An Hour A Day”. You can follow him at http://twitter.com/audette.

It was 1996 and I was an obsessed rock climber. It’s all I wanted to do. I had been training and climbing semi-professionally for about 5 years and didn’t think too much beyond where my next climbing trip would take me. Meanwhile, my Dad (John Audette) was building a company doing Internet marketing and had just moved to Bend, Oregon where I lived (Bend has some of the country’s best rock climbing at Smith Rock, which is why I was there). My Dad’s company was called MMG.

At the time I knew literally nothing about Internet marketing, but I wanted to make some money so I could travel and climb (and basically just live in the dirt). I started doing link building – the MMG Top 100 was this directory link building service. You can see it here.

That was 1996. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was actually doing SEO. We called it “strategic links” but in fact, it was very similar to what link building is today. It was pre-Google, so wasn’t about PageRank or trust. It was simply about traffic. Marshall Simmonds headed up the SEO team at MMG back then, and Derrick Wheeler  worked in the same department. I didn’t work with those guys directly, I was this weird son who lived somewhere else (N. California at the time) and no one knew who I was.

But it was fun back then. Danny Sullivan came to Bend in 1997 to train the MMG team on SEO, back when he had written the “Webmaster’s Guide to Search Engines.” Adam Sherk worked at MMG, too, and so did Jeremy Sanchez and Bill Hunt and lots of other successful SEOs.

During the same time I started moderating the Link Exchange Digest, a web marketing email discussion list that went out to about 250,000 subscribers (which was a lot back then). I ran that list for about 10 years, doing a lot of consulting and projects. It pretty much built me a platform where I’d get leads and credibility just because of my association with the list. I was forced to learn everything I could about online marketing and search – after all I was supposed to be the expert! It was a great incentive to really learn things, plus I got to talk to hundreds, if not thousands, of SEOs, marketers, business owners, etc. So it was really valuable. At that time, it was very much the wild west. It was a free-for-all out there.

MMG was sold to WPP in 2000 and became Outrider. One of MMG’s early clients was Link Exchange. There was this guy that owned Link Exchange back then named Tony Hsieh (now Zappos CEO). Near when he started at Zappos he asked me to start the Shoe Digest – an email list about shoes. That was January of 2001. I’ve worked with Zappos as a consultant ever since, focusing on SEO for the last several years.

At some point, I decided I wanted to go back to school. I was interested in naturopathic medicine and figured out what I needed to get into graduate school. I lasted for about 1 year because in 2005 everything changed for me. That was when my first daughter was born. I decided that being a poor college student wasn’t a very good plan, and that I needed to provide for my family. I put all my effort into building a consulting business, which grew into an agency. Today AudetteMedia is 15 strong and we’re working with some great companies.

There is no clear path to SEO. Most of us are a rag-tag group of people that don’t follow the usual course. SEO is a beautiful thing because it marries art with science, creativity with analytics. I know it’s exactly what I should be doing, and I really love it.

Considered a leading search engine expert, journalist Danny Sullivan has written about search for 15 years. Danny is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, which covers search marketing and search engine news. He produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series, writes a personal blog called Daggle and is @dannysullivan on Twitter.

My SEO story is pretty simple. I was doing web development in 1995. As part of that, we offered online publicity services for all our clients, submitting them to Yahoo, the various search engines at the time, NCSA’s What’s New and other relevant sites. One client kept asking why he wasn’t ranking for a certain term. I didn’t know. Nobody seemed to know, from what I could discover online. So I started researching it. The guide I published in 1996 lead to consulting work in SEO plus to my current career writing about SEO, search engines and search marketing through Search Engine Land.

David’s main motivational driving force is the belief that there is no point having a site if it doesn’t rank No 1. His dedication to giving clients great ROI has led to the constant development of new optimisation techniques and the ability to see algorithmic changes before most other SEO’s. David Naylor has the reputation of being one of the best SEO’s in the world, who has a proven track record of successes in the most competitive markets.

David’s blog attracts a worldwide audience and is well known for its down to earth, yet informative approach on all SEO issues. Always at the forefront of the latest search engine topics, David is an established authority within the SEO community. David owns Bronco with Becky, a highly talented and successful SEO and web development agency.

Mine is a simple story I guess. I have always been interested in technology and computers and as a child I would often be found taking various electronic devices apart to see how they worked. My career started in programming, and I began life on the Internet as a web developer building various websites and platforms, while dabbling in the new art of optimisation.

It all changed for me when we built an e-commerce site in the inkjet industry for a friend. A company called Search Engineers contacted my friend offering “search engine optimisation” with a guaranteed first page placement for only After a few months I was asked by my friend to take a look at it for him as nothing was happening in the results. I got him to do some paid inclusion on Inktomi because of the 48 hour update cycle, and then I could quickly test the on page changes and started looking at OPIC scores.

It’s was a simple agreement I got a 10% share of all web traffic sales and I ended up getting him top rankings for all his short tail and long tail terms. It was much easier then as there wasn’t a great deal of competition but the sales rolled in. I then tested the same theories for “loft conversions” on a monthly retainer of which made a small local “2 man band” company into a one of the UK’s leading loft conversion companies, and a year after starting my adventure in the inkjet industry Becky and I bought the ISP & Web company I worked for. We had a simple belief “To build a company that we would want to work for”. Today we have 18 staff, awesome clients and a crazy work environment

Debra Mastaler is President of Alliance-Link, a link building training firm based in Northern Virginia.  In business since 2000, Debra has trained hundreds of Fortune 500, small business, SEO and advertising agencies how to effectively build long-term quality links for their websites.

In addition to client and training programs, Debra is a featured guest speaker at the Search Engine Marketing Expo (SMX), Search Engine Strategies Conference (SES), is a guest blogger for Search Engine Land and provides link building training sessions for SES and the Direct Marketing Association.  She is also the link building moderator on the SEOBook Community forum.

After college, I spent four years in the Civil Service and then 15 years in the marketing department at Anheuser-Busch.  Both jobs provided valuable experience in all three of the main marketing disciplines – sales, promotions and publicity. When I decided not to go back to work after the birth of my second child, I started piddling around on the computer and taught myself basic web design. Since my husband and I have always been interested in organic food and sustainable living, I decided my first foray into the Internet would be a site offering information on organic foods.  One thing lead to another and about six months after I launched The Organic Way Market, the site started to rank well and displaced a handful of large, well known green sites from the top search results.

This got some people’s attention and pretty soon I had people from the sites I had displaced plus others asking me to help them “SEO” their sites. Well… I had no idea what “SEO” was so I went looking for information and found the now defunct Rank Write newsletter by Jill Whalen and Heather Lloyd Martin.  I contacted Jill and she patiently explained how the links I was securing helped my pages rank and why good content kept people coming back.  I ended up working for Jill for a while before offering link services to the public in 2001.   Jill also introduced me to Danny Sullivan in 2002, we met at a conference in Dallas Texas.  Danny invited me to speak at the 2003 SES San Jose show and I’ve been doing the SES and SMX shows ever since.  I am truly blessed to have good friends who believed in me early on.

Jill Whalen is the CEO of High Rankings, an  SEO consulting company in the Boston, MA area since 1995. She’s the founder of the High Rankings SEO Advisor Newsletter, the High Rankings SEO Forum, and co-founder of the Search Engine Marketing Organization for New England (SEMNE). Follow her on Twitter @JillWhalen.

Back in the early 90′s I had Internet access via a local Bulletin Board System (BBS) and had helped the owner write some technical instructions explaining how to get online using the system (it was pretty complicated back then!). I also had a parenting chat channel on the old Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and subsequently created a parenting website from that. The BBS guy once sent me some information on “submitting to search engines” and suggested it might be something I’d be interested in learning more about, so I did!

Around 1995 I figured out how to get my parenting website to show up in the search engines of the day (Lycos, Infoseek, Excite, AltaVista etc.) and realized that a huge piece of it at the time was simply what words you were using within your page content. With that knowledge, I basically invented what today is called SEO copywriting. I would hire professional copywriters and teach them how to write with keywords for my clients websites and it always worked like a charm!

I also got on some great email discussion lists about the web and started answering others search engine questions. Since there wasn’t very much information out there at the time, people were anxious to learn the ins and outs. At one point, a guy on one of the lists ran a test to see who had the highest rankings for their clients that lasted over time. My results ended up being the best, and that got me more notoriety as well as more clients.

These days, while my focus has remained in the on-page area of SEO (I detest anything to do with link building), I concentrate mostly on the technical design aspects of SEO–those things that can impede your search engine results if not fixed. I do a lot of work with companies who are in the process of a redesign to help ensure that they don’t lose any of their hard-fought search engine traffic.

John Andrews is an SEO consultant in Seattle, Washington specializing in competitive web publishing strategies, advanced SEO, and staff development/training. Through his SEO insider’s blog and his search marketing firm. John has provided the highest levels of SEO performance to projects and clients since becoming a full-time SEO consultant in 2003.

When the world wide web started, doctors not only didn’t tell you much about your health or how they were treating you, but actually insisted that non-medical people would not be able to understand medical information. They sometimes even blocked access, claiming to protect the public from dangerous misunderstandings!

At that time I was working as a Biomedical Engineer, doing my doctoral research on brain imaging and muscle function.  As IT Director for the research center, I was also in a technology leadership role. I brought in early desktop web access so our researchers could access new online resources like WebMD and the emerging National Library of Medicine.

One day a representative of the US Department of Education toured our facility, was impressed, and openly wished for a way to help the public learn about the great clinical research we were doing. She didn’t want consumers to have to wait for the researchers to publish it, the National Library to index it, and WebMD to report on it. A few weeks later I was invited down to Washington to present on ways we could innovate around the traditional medical publishing industry using the Internet.

I proposed ways to reach consumers via what we all now call SEO, and specifically malady/remedy healthcare search marketing. Luckily, around that same time, the MD bureaucrat running our research center got distracted by an opportunity to be TheBigCheese at the local medical school. Outside of his overbearing management, we were able to write progressive and innovative grant proposals powered by IT and SEO. We were awarded millions of dollars in grants, and built things like the Traumatic Brain Injury National Data Center, a regional spinal cord injury information system, and many other web-based projects.

It was classic strategic SEO. My first web team used early web scripting technologies to extract what should have been public information from less-than-friendly information hoarders, and republished it on open web sites we created. In other words we scraped the National Library of Medicine (which was by behind a academic/political pay wall despite being taxpayer funded) on every malady and remedy of interest to our audience.

I ran an end-run around uncooperative academic researchers in a classic move similar to many of the SEO strategies in use today. When a government staffer asks for a research update on a 5 year grant, she generally waits 4 years to get a bland, esoteric journal abstract, and the professor usually tries to make a case for how unfinished the work is; how much value could be extracted by a grant renewal. But when the local Dean demands a research progress report, the same professor delivers an impressive-sounding research progress report ASAP, including explanations of why the work is very important right now!

I knew the actions of the individuals correspond to their motivations. So I approached University marketing departments with attractive trades of targeted consumer traffic and high-profile web exposure (from our growing web sites) for early access to unpublished research reports and progress updates. We then published those on our websites, and fed them to search engines. I consider that one of my marquee moments of SEO innovation, since it provided unique, high-quality “user generated content” of the highest relevance, direct from the authoritative source!

I left to become a full-time independent SEO consultant in 2003, and SEO has been a thrill for me ever since.

Joost is a freelance consultant in SEO, web development and online marketing strategy, working for clients such as eBay, RTL and the European Patent Office, regularly speaking on the topic of SEO and online marketing. Next to his work as an SEO consultant, public speaker and developer, Joost has built many a plugin for WordPress (over 3,5 million downloads) and Firefox, he hosts the weekly WordPress Podcast and blogs about WordPress and SEO on Yoast.com.

I started doing SEO after a short career in IT as both a sales guy and a developer, about 5 years ago, I wanted, and still love, a job in between marketing and development. I learned the “trade” at Onetomarket, an agency which at that time had just left it’s rather blackhat SEO roots, which left plenty of opportunity to learn both blackhat and whitehat SEO. I started blogging around the topic at the same time, first on joostdevalk.nl, later on on yoast.com, met some awesome people like Dave Naylor and BlueGlass’s own Greg Boser who helped me get on the speaking circuit and the rest is “history”

Loren is the Vice President of Services for BlueGlass Interactive, Inc., and  oversees all of the company’s service offerings and teams. Prior to assuming his position at BlueGlass, Loren co-founded Search & Social, an agency specializing in innovative search marketing and social media engagement tactics. Loren is a pioneer in the search marketing industry. He is the Managing Editor of Search Engine Journal, an AdAge Top 10 blog that he created in 2003 to cover search marketing news and tactics.

Over the last decade, Loren has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, universities, financial institutions, and startups. He has successfully assisted them with the development of their strategic online marketing campaigns. Loren has been featured on CNN, NPR, PCWorld, BusinessWeek, ZDNet, PRWeek, TechCrunch, Mashable, and AdAge and is a regular speaker at SMX, Pubcon, and other conference series. He was a member of advisory panels at Yahoo and Microsoft Search.

I first got involved with search marketing in 1998, when I was still a college student, in one of my marketing classes. The entire class was based around putting together a product and its business & marketing strategy, and since the Internet was growing at the time as a normal form of communication, I decided to include online marketing in the strategy. Being that there was no curriculum for online marketing, I had to research and put this together myself, and included site development, directory listings and Yahoo listings in my strategy. This ended up earning me an award from the University and peaked my interest in online marketing.

When it came to be time to look for a job or an internship, a lot of other students were taking internships at large agencies in downtown Baltimore, but I really wanted to do something more niche.  I ended up finding an opportunity interning (and then becoming the Director of Online Marketing) for a small online marketing consultant and took a chance in a field which was it its infancy at the time, but I knew that the reward would outweigh the risk. I immersed myself in SEO from 1999 to 2000 and learning everything I could about AltaVista, Go.com, Yahoo, DMOZ and Lycos. Fortunately, AltaVista looked at onsite ranking factors vs. directory listings, and the challenge of ranking clients on AltaVista helped to prep me for the launch of Google.

At the same time, I also had the chance beta test some of the first paid search campaigns on Yahoo and Dogpile(!), where we would actually buy banner space above the SERPS or small images with text to the right side of the SERPS, that showed incredible click through rate … much better than the traditional media buying I was also doing (this was way before AdWords and even GoTo.com).

Being that SEO, or search marketing in general, was totally in its infancy, there were little resources to actually learn from. So a lot of my learning came from experimenting and using some of the primitive tools that were available at the time. I did turn to some resources which amazingly gave me the ability to connect with others like me; such as the iSearch newsletter, HighRankings Forums and Search Engine Watch. In 2003 later ended up launching my own blog about search, Search Engine Journal.

In a nutshell, I got into SEO because I was very interested in online marketing as a student and SEO gave me the chance to not only be analytical and mathematical, but it also gave me a creative outlet – ESPECIALLY once Google entered the market and link building & offsite signals became part of the equation.

Marcus Tandler, also known as the Mediadonis, is a Partner at the German-based Online-Marketing company Tandler.Doerje.Partner , which has a strong focus on SEO services for large companies and websites looking to improve their rankings within the Google guidelines. Together with his Partner and former Google EMEA Strategic Partner Development Manager Niels Doerje he´s consulting various large companies across Europe about all aspects of Online Marketing.

Marcus is a regular speaker at Online-Marketing conferences around the globe, from O´Reilly´s web2expo to SES New York. He also got a lectureship at the University of Applied Management in Erding, and lectured at several other universities, teaching students how to excel in Online-Marketing.

I started doing SEO around 1999 while studying at the University of Augsburg. I was actually doing some web-design work for various clients, when someday one of these clients asked me, if I could help him rank his new website better at Altavista and Fireball. So I soaked in basically every piece of information I could possibly find, and was immediately hooked

A funny story happened a year later, while I was doing some pretty basic seminars for clients of the German postal service “Deutsche Post” (it´s kind of embarrasing, but here´s a scan of one of the seminar leaflets from 2000. LOL . I was talking about Yahoo! and Altavista these days, and one of the attendees asked me if I have heard of a search engine called “Google” before. I actually had not, since they hadn´t launched in germany yet, and I was surprised to learn, that they could find and rank websites, without you having to submit these sites

And I told him, that I was doing this business for a loooong time now (*lol*), and that I didn´t think that two Stanford dropouts could ever just code a search engine, which could compete with such huge companies like Yahoo! and Altavista… well, I guess I was wrong

Marshall Simmonds is a pioneer in the search marketing industry and Founder and CEO of Define Media Group, Inc.. He specializes in educating enterprise organizations on bringing search and social strategies in-house and into the daily work flow.

Mr. Simmonds was responsible for building About.com into the most successful content network on the Internet.  Acquired in March, 2005 by The New York Times he was named chief search strategist and was responsible for strategic initiatives, maximizing traffic and search engine exposure for NYTimes.com, Boston.com, IHT.com and About.com. During his time at the NYT he grew search referrals to over 25% of total traffic.

In 1997 while doing working at an online marketing agency I read a Nielsen stat that said something like “3000 new websites are coming online each day.” Now my young 20-something brain didn’t think much beyond what most 20 year olds do but I realized in that brief moment it was an incredible amount of information to track.  I also recognized directories (the hot promotional tool at the time) could only scale so much and that search engines, soon to be all twelve of them at the time, were the answer.

The company flew Danny Sullivan to Bend, OR from the UK to train us on the practice of Search Engine Optimization.  It took the better part of the afternoon and we watched in real-time how InfoSeek ranked and re-ranked a page based on changes he made.  Shortly after I started the search department as another value-add to a marketing campaign.  Also at that point I took on the I-Search Digest talking about all things search and marketing which grew to 7000 members in my time moderating.

The days were a bit wilder, Alta Vista, Lycos and Excite were the old men and Northern Light, Googs, and iWon the upstarts.  Comment tags were the rage as well as empty .gifs and yet some things were as important as they are today, titles, headlines, and good content led the charge.  I earned my wings digging the trenches with others in the industry testing, applying and implementing on a page-by-page basis. “We’ll optimize 5 pages for $1500.00” was our now short-sighted but time intensive pricing model.

I jumped ship in 1999 (announced at the inaugural SES) to head up search strategy at About.com which may have been the first in-house SEO job for a major company.  There I learned the finer points of enterprise level work and how to disseminate a central strategy to hundreds of colleagues.  All said I’m thankful for my start and the experiences to this point. I do still miss instant indexing and Direct Hit.

Melanie Mitchell is currently the SVP of Search Marketing at Digitas and leads the agency’s search practice that includes both paid and organic search. Prior to joining Digitas, Melanie was VP of SEO/SEM at AOL where she developed strategy, processes, tracking technology, and reporting, as well as managing the team tasked with driving search traffic to AOL.com’s open web business. She also served as a Sr. Marketing Manager at Network Solutions where she managed direct response marketing campaigns through display, SEM, SEO and strategic alliances for both Network Solutions and NameSecure.com.

Overall she has had 11+ years of search experience, is a recognized industry expert and regularly speaks at industry events such as Pubcon, Search Marketing Expo (SMX), Search Engine Strategies (SES), ad:tech, Searchnomics, Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), and other noted roundtables such as Business Wire and the National Women’s Business Center.

I had always been interested in computers from a young age. Our first computer was an Apple II Plus and my dad was president of the Apple club in the early 80s when we lived in Rhode Island. I remember he used to get these computer programming magazines and I would write the programs in Basic and FORTRAN so I could play games. That was my motivation back then! Through the years my father remained an early adopter of technology (with his love of mathematics and engineering) and I just found it fun being able to create on the screen not realizing how ahead of the curve he was at the time. We all had email accounts and were on Mosaic in the early 90s, but hardly anyone I knew was on the Web back then so I looked to engage more with friends offline for a period of time, but never lost the love of creating on the Web through programming or design.

How I really got into search marketing was a bit of a fluke. In 2000, I was working at Network Solutions on the Marketing team. One day, the Director of Online Marketing asked me “Do you know HTML?” I said “yes, I do.” Then she asked “Do you want to be on my team?” and I suddenly found myself focusing only on the online acquisition piece of the business.

At that time, both paid and organic search was very new and soon after I joined my team she came over to my cube and handed me a bunch of documents with the direction that I was now responsible for both paid and organic search. The curious side of me dove in and I fell in love search marketing right away. It spoke to the technical background in me, my creative side (I received a marketing degree at George Mason University) and while in college I found I had a passion for numbers/statistics. Search marketing brought all of this together where it was creative, challenging, actionable, and you could definitively show impact through the numbers as to how the changes you would make would impact the bottom line.

Over the years, search has changed and evolved in many ways and one the ways I am happiest about is that it is seen less of a stand alone tactic and it is tying more into the overarching “customer journey”. I witnessed mistakes in the early years where companies would drastically cut their TV budget and move those dollars to search due to the performance efficiency only to see search volume decrease not understanding that TV was driving people to search. We’ve come through a lot to get to a more sophisticated approach of attribution modeling and I remain excited about the evolution of this fascinating industry that ties in all the elements to connect with people.

When I look back on it, my journey into search marketing seems to have been fate. Not only am I lucky to be in an industry I find fascinating, but I am lucky to be surrounded by smart, interesting and genuinely nice people.

Michael Dorausch, chiropractor by choice, Webmaster and SEO by necessity.

When I came out of chiropractic school in the 1990s, there weren’t many places you could turn to for learning SEO, so it became necessary for me to learn in order to get my chiropractic website to rank. Back then, if you covered the basics, you’d have a fairly good shot of getting and maintaining good rankings. Things are so much more complicated today. The one thing I had going for me was my desire to learn more, I ‘knew’ people would seek local businesses using the Internet (my first client from local search was in 1998), yet most everyone in my field couldn’t be bothered. Why waste money on a website when people find local businesses through the Yellow Pages?

In retrospect, I’m glad they’ve had that attitude, because even though one of my sites now has thousands of pages of chiropractic content (with nearly all of it being created by others), and ranks for all sorts of industry-specific topics, I feel I could have done more. I think that’s what I like and respect most about other SEOs, they are so passionate about the practice of what they do, and they continually push forward and accomplish new things. The friends I’ve made in the SEO community have been a great motivation with their can-do attitudes. They don’t try their best, they do their best, and they get things done. The persistent commitment SEOs have to continually earn money for their clients (and themselves) keeps me energized and humbled at the same time.

Patrick Altoft runs an SEO agency in the UK called Branded3, blogs about SEO at Blogstorm and can be found speaking at most of the UK SEO conferences.

I started messing around building websites in 1998 but didn’t start working in the web industry until after University in 2002. My first job was as webmaster at an insurance company in the UK and as part of that I learnt about SEO and delivered massive increases in traffic & sales over the 4 years I worked there. In my spare time I setup some very successful affiliate sites and decided to start an SEO consulting business and left the day job.

A year later we started the SEO team at Branded3 and in the last 3.5 years this has grown from a new business into a 25 strong team managing some of the largest natural search accounts in the UK.

Rae Hoffman-Dolan aka “Sugarrae” is an affiliate, SEO and Internet marketing veteran and the Owner and Managing Director of MFE Interactive. You can meet her in person at the Affiliate Summit East 2011 SEO Training (seating is limited).

In 1997 my healthy two week old son, CJ, suffered a massive bilateral stroke that left him severely multiple handicapped. My dad sent me an old office computer to do research about his condition and I made a webpage detailing his story (at the time, strokes were thought to be rare in kids). I started to receive emails from other parents who were apparently finding my site while searching for childhood stroke terms on the various search engines of the day. Long story short, I ended up founding the first international support group for parents and families of pediatric stroke survivors to ever register with the AHA. Around 2001 I made my first ever commercial website, specially attempting to rank for certain keywords as an affiliate. It’s been one hell of a ride.

Rand Fishkin is the CEO + Co-founder of the web’s most popular SEO software company, SEOmoz. He’s a frequent traveler, speaker and evangelist of all things inbound marketing and is, despite his many faults, married to the amazing travel blogger, Everywhereist.

In 2001, I dropped out of the University of Washington’s Business School two classes from graduation to work full time with my Mom, Gillian, on her small business marketing company. I built websites, did usability consulting and eventually, needed to help our clients with SEO, which led to a string of mistakes with contractors, experiments and tactics. I realized that SEO shouldn’t be so hard to learn and hard to do, which led me to create the SEOmoz blog in late 2003. By 2005, SEOmoz was the name of our consulting firm, and SEO was 90% of our work.

As Moz grew in popularity, we realized consulting was a terrible way to scale and, in 2007, launched the software subscription side of our business. That performed very well and in Nov. 2007, we took venture capital to help build Linkscape, our web index, which launched the following October. In December, 2008, we returned to profitability (whew!) and have been growing ever since. In early March 2011, we had over 10,000 subscribers!  For anyone interested, I recently made a slide deck on the Story of Moz: 1981-2011 at Slideshare.

How did you get started in SEO?  Please feel free to share your stories in the comments below, I would LOVE to hear them all!

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