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 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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I was a high school senior back in late 2006 when I first discovered SEOmoz and the world of SEO. I had always been reading about SEO and internet marketing on blogs all throughout high school, but felt it was time to test the theories that many “experts” had put into their posts. In 2007 I created several blogs to test various SEO methods, white hat and black hat, to see how the search engines react to different methods in different methods.
Though those blogs no longer exist, in January 2010 I have managed to take all my practice and knowledge and form my own company, Rampify, which caters to businesses in need of SEO whether local or national. The first months of business were tough, but I was thankful to land my first client in May 2010. Since then my company has been growing on the client side each month. My first client is still requesting my services to this day and his results have been great.
What’s with everyone and their professional head shots
Cool stories from everyone, and Marcus, that story cracks me up.
** PURSE **
Mine is simply a cropped photo of me at a boxing match with a beer in my hand. Feel better?
Haha, mine was taken in a bbq joint a few weeks ago in Austin. Freshest photo I had.
I worked many years in the IT field in high school and college looking at code for an auto insurance company. I decided I needed a change in college since I began to hate code. I went to business so I could still focus on IT. There I found the wonderful world of marketing that both captivated and delighted. I knew I wanted to be a part of it but I just didn’t know how.
I would up getting an internship that utilized my IT skills to help setup and maintain a network while creating marketing lists. Not at all glamorous. I also had to monitor their website or any traffic that resulted in a contact being delivered.
From here I was saw an internship for an SEO position that made use of every skill that I had acquire over the years that wound up putting me as a Director of Online Marketing once I graduated. From here I moved on to building a budding and successful SEO practice for a marketing firm here in Cleveland.
I guess you can sum it all up with one word: Accidentally. 5 years ago I accidentally became an SEO and haven’t looked back.
Umm the underpinnings go back to the days of the dinosaurs, but the short version is that in the mid-90′s I and my partners formed a company that was going to sell hardware and do UNIX (SCO) and Novell networking for clients (what we had been doing for our previous employer, but thought we could do better on our own)
Well, we all know what happened with SCO, and who ever even mentions Novell now? And of course, after the first year or so, Gateway and Dell and others made it pretty much impossible to cop a decent margin on hardware. So we cobbled up a 1996 style website (uggo-city) and basically said we’d be willing to do perform whatever services we could convince someone to pay us for (computer services preferred but not required – for some years I was managing a southern rock band on behalf of the company too)
Lo and behold, General Motors wandered onto our crappy website, and asked us if we were interested in bidding on a pilot project of database driven websites for their dealer network. We did, and they were blown away with what we came up with. Literally the DAY BEFORE WE WERE TO SIGN THE BIG CONTRACT THAT WAS GOING TO MAKE US UNBELIEVABLY WEALTHY AND SUCCESSFUL management swooped in and eliminated the entire department we’d been dealing with, and sent the project over to EDS.
Once they let us out of the hospital after the shock and trauma, we decided this web thingy might be a bandwagon we could get next to. So we built some sites for local companies, and a few national ones. Mostly leaning towards ecommerce. Just about the same time we all recognized that I myself have no discernable graphic design skills whatsoever, some of our existing clients, for whom we’d built sites, started asking “Now what?”
I didn’t know the answer to that, so I Googled it (or back then, maybe Alta Vista’d it) and found WebmasterWorld.com.
I never left.
Your EDS story made me smile…
Glad you got over the shock.
My story was pretty simple
My first job out of college was working for a start-up web development company that was founded by a VC, two stock-brokers and a former pharmaceutical executive. None of them had any technical background (1 guy could barely use his AOL email). They just wanted to be able to take the company public – it was a mess. I was young and naive and I thought they could do it. Boy was I wrong!
I finally left the company soon after 9/11 and I didn’t want to really do anything with websites anymore. That didn’t last long… A family friend had a recording studio on the Lower East Side in Manhattan and he needed someone to help him with business development. My wife (Danielle), my brother (Patrick) and I (we had all worked together at the old place) built him a website. While they worked on the site, I started learning everything I possibly could about SEO (something that had been completely ignored at the company I worked for).
Soon we had him ranking for just about every single ‘recording studio’ term imaginable. One day he came to me and said “We have to take our phone number off the website – I’m getting too many inquiries”. So we took the number off. A few weeks later he asked me to remove the address because people were stopping by thinking it was an Abbey Road type place!
At that point, my job was done with him. During this time, people kept asking him how he was doing so well and he started referring people to me. And that’s how we came to form 10e20 (which then merged into BlueGlass) and how I got started in SEO.
I left the big corporate world in 1998 to move to a dairy farm in Ireland with my Irish husband. In 2000 he started his own accountancy firm and I thought that a website would be a great way to keep connected with his UK clients and help get new prospects. After doing a personal site via MS Word, I learned HTML from a massive book and finished his website just in time to give birth to our second son. After a few months he was getting email enquiries from around the world, mainly because of articles on the site, especially the one “Moving to Ireland from the UK” (which is really outdated but still ranks on the first page of Google). That’s when I realised the power of search rankings and started studying up on SEO online and started offering web design and SEO services to local businesses. Ten+ years later I am still working away at it and now using social media as a compliment to the SEO services. In the beginning I learned most from Jill Whalen, et al at the High Rankings Forum and it was really great to finally meet her in person at SES London a couple years ago, courtesy of Twitter. It’s great to be able to work online from rural Ireland, but it gets a bit isolated.
I started into SEO in 2004 when working as a software engineer. The boss came in one day and said “hey, can you do anything to get us more visitors from search engines?” From that moment on my love affair with search only grew stronger. 1 year later I had my own sites ranking #1 for terms like “text message”
A few years later when looking at job postings I said “hey, I’m pretty good at doing SEO for my own websites, why not try it as a career too?”
Now.. I do SEO for fortune 100 clients like Ford (and still maintain a few sites of my own
and love every minute of it.
Got started in 1998, when I needed a better alternative to LinkExchange (remember them?) for getting traffic to my web graphics site. Some guy named Danny Sullivan had posted a few articles about “optimizing” your pages, so I started creating extra pages just for Infoseek. Ahhh, those were the days – Infoseek would index you in minutes, and put you right on top
LOL love the stories covered in the article. I’m still a newbie with 9months under the belt so it’s super fantastic to read up on the pros and where they all started from. Gives me that extra boost and courage to reach the heights they reached in a couple of years.
I have to thank Rupert Murdoch if I am now an SEO Consultant. Seriously! Back in 2003 I was doing a totally different kind of job: director of programming for a Cable/Sat Movie Channel in Italy. It was a promising career and after 11 years on TV I was close to be make the jump to channel director.
But Mr. Murdoch decided he needed to expand his business in Italy and bought the platform the channel was… and decided it was a clone of one of his.
That was the first time I got penalized because of duplicate content.
Without a channel to buy and schedule movies for, the CEO proposed me to relaunch the other channels’ websites, that were in a pathetic state under every aspect.
The reason? “Gianluca, you are the one who understand better how this Internet thing goes, and I am sure you can make something good out of it”.
And that is how I started to learn and understand how a web sites works, what is wrong and what is good in order to retain traffic and, from there, how to increase that traffic. So, from improvised Project Manager I moved slowly but firmly to Web Marketer and SEO entered into my life, since – in 2008 – I felt enough confident to offer my services as Consultant.
I’m one of those “failed” web designers. I ran a freelance web design business around 2001-2002 and struggled to make sales. One day someone called me, and said they found my site in Yahoo. I thought that was pretty cool and started looking into how to make that happen more often.
Within a few months I was getting a ton of web design leads, but I wasn’t selling anything. It turns out I’m just a really bad designer. That’s ironic too, as my sister is a professional graphic artist. I guess she got all the design genes.
But while I wasn’t any good at design, I did realize there was value in this ability to generate business leads via search engines. I started studying that and participating in forums (High Rankings, Digital Point, WMW, SEW, etc.) and then also got a part-time job as an internet marketing assistant with a small local marketing agency. That gave me more time to look into it.
At the time, my major challenge was with a client whose site was build with frames whereas today we would use include files. They had some interior pages ranking but only the middle (body copy) frame was indexed, so visitors would land on a page with no logo or navigation! I think we implemented some scripting to detect if the page was loading within a frameset, and if not to do a META refresh. Ah, the good old days!
By late 2003 I left the part-time gig and started working full-time on my own business, which was now entirely SEO. For the first couple of years it was just myself as a one-man-shop. Then I started hiring a few employees to help out. I was actively involved in managing most of the client accounts all the way until about a year ago or so. Now I manage our team of 8 total employees, with roughly 40 clients. Our clients look to us to generate inbound leads and enhance their top and bottom lines. I love it!
Good stuff – this was a fun read.
When I finished grad school in 1997, I decided to get out of academia and back into applied work. I was a double-major (Psych. & Comp. Sci.) as an undergrad and had been coding since I was a kid, so when the web really took off, I figured that was the place to be. I ended up with the choice of writing code for a back or working for a “start-up” that was pretty much one guy and some boxes in an abandoned warehouse. I figured, being broke and single, it was as good a time as any to take a risk, so I went to work in the abandoned warehouse.
We were an ISP/ASP in the broadest, most ill-defined sense, and my boss had to consult out-of-office 3-4 days a week to make ends meet. So, it was just me, the servers, the phone, and confused and frequently angry clients. One day, one of the less angry clients called and asked why he wasn’t ranking (on HotBot, I think), so I decided to try and figure it out.
I wore a lot of hats, and eventually helped grow that company to 15-or-so people, but I probably learned the most from those early days of getting yelled at on the phone and getting my hands dirty.
I was slated to be a doctor – dropped out of school one year to graduation. Decided that mixing 2 white chemicals together to make a green chemical wasn’t my forte.
I took a job at an online retail shop and saw fields in the ecommerce backend which said SEO -and plugged in descriptive text about each product and watched as the traffic and sales ‘magically’ grew out the windows.
Hooked from then point onwards. I spent years learning from Tropical SEO, Aaron Wall, PeterD and Stundubl. I picked up every single book on the field and branched out into analytics and marketing. At one point, my RSS feed had well over 900 blogs and my inbox was always fully processed (eg no unread mail). Neglect to say – I learned a great deal.
Eventually I joined several forums online and spent a lot of time digesting each article from start to present to help establish historical perspective and picked up additional hands on experience along the way. I remember having no money to learn from SEO conferences that I’d save up for the expo hall so I could attend and thank my idols in person, along the way – I learned more as people would often share their start in this industry and how to develop one’s expertise further.
This industry definitely given me a lot in my honest opinion, at the very least – self-confidence, which in itself is a priceless gift.
Fantastic post.
I had been doing web design and development since high school and it continued to pay my bills while in college getting my degree in Poli Sci / Af Am. studies. I decided to take a year off before heading to law school so that I could get away from studies a bit. At that point I took a job at Virante, Inc. as their second employee and only developer. At that point the company consisted of owner and at-that-time SEO wunderkind Ryan Allis, Malcolm Young and myself.
Ryan ran off to help start this silly company iContact, who has ever heard of them??, and Malcolm and I were left the reins of an SEO company following the Florida update. I quickly had to turn my design and development skills into something more and became entrenched in the white-hat, black-hat debates at SEOChat between some soon-to-be-well-known SEOs. I decided to play both sides of the aisles, spending most of my time contributing and learning with the black hats at the new Syndk8.net while, at the same time, using that knowledge to improve the white hat strategies we used on client sites.
It seemed to pay off. Now, 7 years or so later, Virante is up to 16 full-time employees and life is grand.
In high school, I was dead set on becoming an accountant. I worked during my senior year in the accounts payable department for Allied Signal’s engines division. That year convinced me that I wanted nothing to do with accounting.
It was 1998, I had just graduated high school, was engaged to get married, and ended up being referred to a guy that was looking for an assistant to design and build custom swimming pools. The owner of the company’s son was working for Avenue A and convinced us that we needed a website. I did a bunch of research, built a horribly ugly piece of junk site using MS Frontpage 98, and we started getting business through it. I ended up going to school and working full time for the next 2 years and ended up building a swimming pool for a guy that was running an online pharmacy. He hired me to be a designer but we soon found that I was better suited to do development because my design work sucked. There was a major emphasis put on developing around what was needed for SEO, so I ended up learning quite a bit through reading around WebmasterWorld and it kind of evolved into running my own affiliate sites and taking on clients that were referred to me.
Anyone remember StoresOnline? They were a scam-internet marketing company that sold people shitty software and taught them (very basic) SEO via seminars. I was 20 and looking to make money, and they sold me.
I became so obsessed with SEO that I started filling my RSS reader up with a lot of the guys in this article – Rand, Aaron, SEM CHat ( I think that’s what it was), Jim Boykin, Stuntdubl, the works. I’ve learned more from my RSS reader in 8 years then a hundred years in any college!
I was doing design and front-end development for a small web design company. I wanted to make the best websites for our clients and the best experience for their users, so I tried to learn everything I could about usability and accessibility. Somewhere along the way I heard about this crazy thing called “search engine optimization”, discovered the SEOmoz beginner’s guide, and the rest is history.
Back in 2000 right after a web design course I took up my first IT job where I was helping more experienced web designers with sites for clients. One day my boss asked me to submit a client’s site to some directories – I knew nothing about it at the time and started searching and reading around, found Search Engine World where Danny Sullivan used to write at the time and got hooked for life! Then there was SEOChat, then there was Syndk8, consulting for occasional clients, MFA sites for myself. Around 2005 I became a full time SEO and never looked back. SEO is an occupation I can never get bored or tired of – things change every day, every day brings a new challenge, and nothing makes me more proud than to see that I can cope with these challenges.
Really cool stories from everyone. I remember being 18 and a marketing associate at Microsoft Canada. We had a marketing portal that our resellers had a hard time finding on both Google and MSN.ca at the time. I figured a large corporation should be able to have its own search engine find its internal resources and that’s when I started reading up on SEO. Our marketing vendor had no clue as to how to go about it so I took up the charge and kept reading up on the topic. Fast forward a couple of years and working agency side, in-house, freelance, and now running my own agency, I’m even more enamored with SEO and IM than I was when I first started. What a ride.
I started dabbling in affiliate marketing and learning web design along the way. This at about the time the online poker craze started getting big and I was trying out aff marketing for pay poker sites. Bumbling around on forums, learning what I could but still not quite realizing I was only a minnow playing in a market full of sharks (the big guns in poker already made big $ in porn and had money and experience far beyond me).
Then my brother in law needed website for his locally based business. I threw one together, applied what I knew of SEO, gave it a local twist, and presto. He had rankings in no time and it doubled his business in the first year. Wooohooo!
From there it just clicked for me. Local was where the web was going and very few SEO’s were really taking the local approach yet. Local became my niche and a few years later that market exploded
Around 2005 I was developing websites and I managed to break a big clients website.
To make up for it I decided to find out how to attract more traffic for them. This worked really well and they even awarded me with a free trip to Sydney for my efforts.
I continued to try and focus on SEO for our clients but found it hard to do inside a website development firm, so I started my own business just over a year ago.
I’m totally enjoying the fact that my focus now is on helping my clients do better.
Thanks for these fantastic articles.
I was working in E-Learning when one day my Boss asked me “do you know what is SEO? “. I was bit surprised because those days I was really passionate about SEO and was learning it as a process of Self Development. He asked me if I am ready to shift my stream from E-Learning to SEO. I instantly agreed and that was the beginning of my journey in Search Engine Optimization.
I am running a blog http://www.joynama.com where I post different contents on Internet Marketing. You can visit my blog to more know about me.
Now I am the Senior Project Manager in Internet Marketing Department at Indus Net Technologies managing more than 100 SEO resources.
My SEO career came upon me completely by chance. After working for Disney for 5 years I decided to shift my career direction from a management career with the Disneyland Resort to a web designer. With no previous professional web experience, I began working as a customer support rep for a real estate web design and marketing company in 2006. Most of my time was spent assisting clients with modifying and troubleshooting problems with their websites, but was taught bits and pieces about SEO along the way. My strong customer service skills and quick learning gained me some notoriety in the company and after only a year these qualities lead me to be promoted to the website marketing team.
Knowing practically nothing about SEO, I was given a crash course on the subject matter and was quickly thrown into the roll or analyzing and optimizing real estate websites. To keep up with the more experienced reps I found myself spending countless hours reading and learning more about SEO. This act of survival slowly became an obsession and by the end of 2007 I was hooked on what would become what is now one of my greatest passions.
I only just recently got into SEO after years reading about it.
Our main SEO guy in the agency left a few weeks ago so I took over some of his responsabilities and I’m now assiting in managing SEO campaigns for different clients.
I must say it’s a lot of hard work when you are new to the whole thing and you can never stop reading about it as it is an industry that is constantly evolving, more so than many others, but I’m thoroughly enjoying it…
I concur with Jon Payne’s comments – I’m sort of a failed web designer as well. Although I’d like to consider myself creative and capable with graphic design, I just had to face up to the fact that I’m painfully tidy and organised, and just had use a career to make the most of those skills. The technical aspects of SEO and the need for a highly organised approach just suited me down to the ground; while I fell into the job accidentally, I knew immediately that’s what I wanted to do and have been passionate about it ever since.
Like many, I’m a failed web designer (although I still think I am skilled
)
I started back in 2005 promoting adsense and affiliate websites, one a very, very succesful affiliate website.
I’ve been an in house, freelancer and agency based SEO – I now speak at events and hold training sessions
I started my career as an SEO back in July 2005. I read many books from prominent authors including Aaron Wall, etc. I am glad that decision was right.
Fantastic article! I’ve only been introduce to seo way back in 2009. I’m glad I made the right decision to learn about SEO.
I started to build websites in 2003, and by extension got interested a bit in SEO.
However, it’s in the spring of 2004 with a SEO Contest in France called “mangeur de cigogne” (stock eater), that it really took off. I finished third, but the prize really came next. I knew how to rank high Google; thus, make money with my own websites and for clients.
Great stories! Mine was along similar lines to Melanies, although not exactly.
I was at the North East Chamber of Commerce and the manage at the time had to compile a website for the business as part of her degree. She had no clue and myself and another bloke were asked if we could put a site together.
The site was put together using the CoffeCup HTML editor, lots of button clicking to spit out a generated table based design. What I hated the most is that I did not understand how all of this code worked and through the same business I was directed towards a qualification in advanced telemantics.
Shortly after that I started as a web designer for a local charity where the real learning began. Lots of forum signups and answers to my questions led me to understanding that it was all much more than designing pretty websites, you needed eyes to see them. Buying eyes.
After thinking I’d learnt enough along the way I ended up being a bit of a nomad, wandering all over South Africa. So after stopping in a holiday town in the Western Cape for a few months I ended up working in a bar when a random long haired hooligan came in with a programming issue.
After writing out a good deal of code by hand for him (between pouring a few drinks) he pocketed the notes and off he went. Two days later he returned with his boss to meet what he thought was a wizz-kid and I had a job, if… and that was a big if, I could drink at least one other member of the 5 person company under the table*. Thankfully I was a relatively slow drinker those days.
While we were a small company in early 2000 we were forging along online in e-commerce. As time would go by I ended up going from web developer to just about “if-it-plugs-in-it’s-your-job” but eventually settled in on the simply idea that no matter how good the design or how functional the website may seem it comes down to the bottom line. Visitors in are good, but visitors also need to convert. I’ve tried most of the sneaky tricks over the years but come to the conclusion that most techniques that are done right seem to stand the test of time (mostly).
So now I find myself with a team of talented youngsters who now look at me as the old guy. They do all the design (which I sucked at) and the programming (which I enjoyed but was Microsoft bound – damn you ASP!) and I concentrate on SEO and other aspects of online marketing.
*for the record, no matter how much older I’ve gotten, I can still drink these guys under the table.
My SEO-Story? Read the 2009-version under the “Website”-Link
Having previously been involved in running Pubs and Nightclubs in the UK, I wanted to get away from the industry as had recently became a father. I stumbled across a company that was selling domain names and hosting back in 2000, was still all pretty new then to Business owners, as time went by the list of services also grew as did the amount of BS that was being spouted to new clients about the must have services for their websites! After digging arounf and then actually going to a new SEO company, I then actually started to learn about the correct way to optimise a website. Further down the line after practicing what I preached, launched a few successful affiliate sites before then moving on as a freelance SEO consultant! The fun never stops!
My first experience really focusing on SEO was in 2006 when I worked in the IT dept. of a large audiobook publisher. I was responsible for maintenance of our existing ecommerce websites that had been created in the mid-90′s.
SEO had always been kind of a mystery to me, but after implementing some more robust tracking into our sites and reviewing the traffic, I dove in and learned that we had a lot of room for improvement where SEO was concerned. Don’t get me wrong, our business was strong, but the site traffic was coming mostly from offline marketing.
I continue to learn from many of the people listed above and also the commentators here. If there’s one thing I do know for sure about SEO it’s that there are baseline rules, but the industry and techniques are overwhelmingly organic so I will never know it all;)
Love hearing all these stories…especially how the majority of people just fell into it.
It was 2005 and I had been out of school for a year when a guy I knew told me he had a job that I might be interested in. I had no idea what SEO was or what I was supposed to do but it was in the marketing field and I figured I should do something with my degree. Turns out I loved it and luckily was able to learn from some really smart people along the way! I ended up working for two different consulting companies before moving in-house in 2009.
In 1999 someone introduced me to the world of Viagra affiliate sales and I started spending my nights and weekends building sites, submitting them to Yahoo, DMOZ and anywhere else I could get exposure.
Yeah that’s me and a coworker in the logo of my site HappyViagra.com
http://www.ohsohandy.com/images/happy-viagra-logo.jpg
When Google first launched Adwords it was on CPM and I jumped in on every keyword related to Viagra. Your position was determined by “popularity” which I figured out to be CTR. Click my ads 30 or some times before I left for work and I’d keep #1 all day long. Of course others figured it out as well (I’m sure I’ve since hung out with those competitors at PubCon) and I stepped up the game by scripting a tool to click my ad, hit the back button, several times per second. I was killing it. Paid cash for my car with one month of sales. All thanks to that crazy rapid mouse clicking computer that freaked out my roommates.
Eventually Google got around to figuring out my scam and they sent me a polite “Stop it” letter.
So that began the journey I’ve been on ever since to learn and test everything in order to rank. I quit selling Viagra long ago but it was a fun start.
I remember in 1996 I was selling websites and I had a client ask me why they were not showing up in search engines. I didn’t know the answer to the question and I don’t like being stumped by a client, so when I got back to the office I searched on infoseek for “search engine positioning”.
The #1 result was a $20 ebook that basically said to copy the source code of the top ranked site and stuff the words into hidden text on your page. Each engine had its own little tricks, you had to manually submit your URLs and most engines took 4-6 weeks to come visit your site and add the page.
Infoseek immediately indexed your page, you could tweak the code and then submit the page and see how you did. They only let you do it once every 24 hours, so if you didn’t rank #1, you would have to create a new version of the page (we didn’t even call them doorway pages back then) and submit index1.html, index2, etc until you got to the top. Each engine had its own little tricks and I learned most of them.
Ranking was very simple for some of the engines and time consuming for other…but even being #1 wouldn’t get you a lot of traffic because no one except Yahoo had more than about 15% market share. Consumers didn’t trust the engines much, but I was able to rank all of my clients in the top 10 across 3 or 4 engines. I remember that by 1999 I had clients who had paid me a couple grand each ranking #1 for terms like “auto leasing” and “DSL”.
Hindsight is 20-20, so I can only lament all the opportunities I squandered by never jumping into the affiliate game or really working on my own websites “back in the day”
I’ve been developing websites since the late 1990s, went to college for Web design/development, didn’t get much out of schooling. During my freelancing career, I was looking for opportunities to make money online using my web building talents (besides building websites for clients). I got into Internet marketing briefly, learned the basics of SEO by practicing it on my own sites.
A few years and many optimized websites later… I would consider myself a knowledge SEO, dare I say “an Expert” without getting flamed off the Internet
I am a native of England and was living in San Francisco.
I had my own wedding and event DJ business back in 1997 and my website was always top on the big engines of the time. So I started outsourcing myself to design agencies.
Whatever I did ranked and I always wondered why so dug a little deeper and turned it all into a business
I specialise in Google adWords these days as I find organic seo too easy
David
I started out to be a newspaper reporter with a BA in Journalism. Went to work for the Houston Chronicle in the 80s and quickly found I was more interested in the new computers they were installing in the newsroom than anything else. At the same time, I got my first home computer (pre-PC) and was hooked. Tried my hand at technical writing and programming, but found they didn’t fill my need for techno geek satisfaction.
Moved to Palm Springs and went to work for a magazine publishing company in their new web development division (1998) where I could combine my creativity, writing and thirst for everything new on the web. Found out quickly that good content and site structure sent my sites to the top of the ranks and I was hooked.
I’ve been working in SEO for about 12 years with about the last seven with that title. Been an in-house SEO for the last six.
I started in SEO almost 10 years ago, back then I was focused on being found in Hotbot, Ask Jeeves, and Lycos, and then I heard about this site called google. I owned a lucrative business at the time (at 15 years old) and found that my business that was findable in these search engines was not located within google’s index. I found that once I made google aware of my site (submission form) within 4-6 weeks my site was indexed but I was still burried in the results.
I started working up and up the SERP, learning nuances from the blackhat world as well as “best practices.” To make my site rank. It started doing decent, and then my site was shut down….
Fast forward to 2011 and I have clients that are performing admirably, none were affected by panda/farmer, and Traffic is still growing. Now I also rank for search terms at will, but still am learning tons every day. I am focused on SEO Design, and completly white hat techniques, and have never been happier with search.
I look forward to another year of kick tail seo and design solutions.
The long-winded version of how I get started in SEO is available here: http://www.danperry.com/blog/my-seo-story/
The synopsis:
In 1999, I traded a website I designed for my local golf course in exchange for my annual membership fees. Within a few months I was ranking for a surprisingly generic term, and the light bulb went off. I started building my own sites, and became mildly successful with affiliate marketing.
In 2003 a head-hunter contacted me for an open position in Chicago, and I took it. Other than running my own, small agency in the late 90′s (focused exclusively on the golf industry), I’ve only worked as an in-house SEO.
I started at Career Education Corporation, running SEO/SEM/Analytics for 80+ for-profit colleges and universities (over 140 websites), then moved to run the SEO team at Cars.com, and am now the Director of SEO at Turner Broadcasting, working on such fun sites as NCAA.com, PGATOUR.com, NBA.com, AdultSwim.com, TeamCoCo.com, etc.
I started back in 1998. having finished Uni getting a BA Hons in Design Multimedia, i started working contract for a local IT firm (there wasnt much web work back then and everyone thought it was an IT thing, not a design thing). one of my first clients was a small trophy engraving company who wanted to be top of Altavista for trophy engraving. back then it was all meta tags… but i managed it.
later i set up my own studio and people kept asking for SEO services. as there wasnt much to it back then i charged as little as £600 per year as a bolt on to web design and development.
later this increased dramatically as the work involved became more and more involving.
Now i head up the digital team at one of Manchester’s leading studios where i impart my sage like knowledge to anyone who will listen… the background in web design has become invaluable as many SEO’s dont really understand what goes into a website and what can be done.
Great stories. It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one who had an odd start to my SEO career.
I originally attended The Ohio State University and studied Graphic Design. However, as a person that had to finance their own college, I quickly found out how expensive it was and was forced to drop out when I couldn’t cover the out-of-pocket tuition that student loans wouldn’t cover – even though I was working full time as a supervisor at UPS. It really threw me off course for a few years…
As of six years ago, I was working 7 days-a-week in two dead-end jobs – one as a clerk at a large retail office supplies chain, and another as a “Pet Counselor” at a regional chain of pet stores. Becoming tired of that existence, I began to read and read and read some more about web design. After a while, I began to build out sites and was able to latch on at a company called Cornerstone Local.
In 2006, Cornerstone Local launched an initiative called Your Marketing Corner (a now defunkt retail internet marketing store). I moved to that team as a web designer. I specialized in building websites that were pretty mainly on the WordPress platform. We were building sites for companies all over the United States and even launched initiatives in South America.
However, after a while we began to notice that although the sites were pretty, we couldn’t find them in Google, Yahoo, or anywhere else. For me, my transition into SEO began there. I began reading blogs, forums, testing, and more. I spent all waking (and sometimes sleeping) hours learning SEO.
From there, I was able to move to an Internet Marketing company based in Columbus, Ohio called People To My Site as an SEO Analyst. After a year or so, I’d worked my way up to Director of SEO. At PTMS, I had the pleasure of working on some awesome clients including Scotts Miracle-Gro, Lexus, Signs Now, The Arnold Sports Festival, and several more. It was a great job!
I recently changed jobs and am now the Internet Marketing Director at Germain, an automotive dealer group here in Columbus, Ohio. I’ll still be managing SEO, but will be handling Social Media and all other internet activities as well – maybe even going back to my roots as a designer!
I made my first website in 2001 and started e-commerce the same year. Things were really tedious then, and a lot has changed since. I’ve been doing SEO a long time but it was a long time before the term became part of every day vocabulary. It was just something you just did to get results and part of the job. I was able to determine a lot of on page, and off page variables that would effect rankings etc. I always remember ripping apart Yahoo! source code and shaking my head that it didn’t meet W3 compliance lol.
Lets face it Google made a lot of things pretty blatant highlighting page descriptions in the SERPS etc. However deductive reasoning and observing results after site changes were primary ways of identifying things. Since then I’ve come a long ways, worked with some big companies, and gone through the UBC Web Analytics program by the WAA. Split A/B multivariate testing, CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization), ROAS, and ROI are all part of daily vocabulary.
I studied marketing in 1997, when Penn State was first getting their computer labs. I got into the search engines right away – I remember Webcrawler fondly. Late nights in the computer lab, instead of partying. Since I couldn’t find a lot of the sites I wanted to see, I started building them on TriPod. Then I became fascinated about getting my sites ranked. It was really a self-serving thing, but I was hooked. SEO wasn’t a term then.
I kept up with the web and graphic designing, and created an online music magazine interviewing big rock stars (before RollingStone.com was born and stole our market share). That’s when I realized search engines were my best friend – they opened a lot of doors. Right around there I started to hear about “SEO” as a skill, and claimed it. At the same time I started to take jobs working for eCommerce companies, which turned into my niche.
Now I run SEO for an big agency owned by eBay, working with many enterprise-level retail sites, for stores you see in every mall. I owe it all to Webcrawler.
I got started back in 2000. It wasn’t called SEO back then. I was a vendor for Amazon.com. I sold flash cards for digital cameras. I was a VERY cocky 23 year old sales rep that was ranked #55 out of #80 salespeople in the company. I walked up to the owner of the company and told him I’d be his #1 salesperson within a year. He laughed at me, reminded me of my current ‘position’ in the company. I insisted I would be if he’d just allow me to work on getting sales from the ‘dot coms’. He thought I was nuts . . . he said he’d assign the accounts to me (at the time they weren’t doing business with us) but that if I failed at becoming the #1 salesperson within a year then he’d fire me. I agreed.
That lit a fire under my ass. I setup a meeting with Amazon.com. The buyer blew off the 3pm meeting but I sat in the Amazon lobby until 7pm. When the buyer came down, I insisted on a meeting. He gave me 30 mins. He liked what I offered and setup my SKUs. About 2,000 RAM modules and a dozen flash cards for digital cameras.
Nothing happened for months. I was getting nervous. Then, he placed a large order with me. I dug around to find out why. I discovered then that I ranked well in the search engines for the 32MB, 64MB, etc. compact flash cards on Google, Yahoo, etc.
After that, I researched the hell out of how to do more of that. I jumped in newsgroups, forums, chat rooms, you name it to learn.
I became the number salesperson within a year. I left for the competitor a year later. I then left to another company and finally I wound up here, at Tribune Company. I love it. I now handle strategy and direction for the newspaper and broadcast sites of Tribune (about 70 domains) and spend the majority of my time at 435Digital.com working with Tribune’s advertisers (and other companies) to help improve their SEO. It’s Tribune’s digital services arm and it runs a lot like a consulting firm. I get to do some sales calls again and get to do a ton of SEO for companies that really appreciate the ROI I provide. Of course, I now also do social media, paid search, online reputation management, training seminars/classes, etc.
I love my job. I love this industry!
Great story and testament to American excellence Brett!
In 1997 I was a co-host on a morning Country show in South Eastern Arizona and was hired by the radio station to design 3 websites for these 3 sister stations this communications group owned. I was going to school for Information Systems, but back then if you were into computers people though you could design websites, network computers, fix computers, create world peace …. oh and SEO (before it had a name) you get the idea.
Anyway it was a great growing and learning experience … a couple years later got my own ecommerce sites going (still going to this day) and that was back in 1999. As time went on and I learned a lot of what to do and even more of what NOT to do on my own sites. I had some fun in 2003ish with aff marketing and earning a ton of money with adsense before getting banned (learned even more) seriously .. even my neighbors to this day still get denied adsense accounts hahahah.
People saw what I was doing and started contacting me to do side work … the referrals have not stopped to this day … so a few years back I formed Dream Systems Media and became legit. We keep growing our firm and running our businesses. I have enjoyed every moment of it … and knowing most everyone here in this thread.
I was in my senior year of college, and I needed to find an internship ASAP. I found that was about search marketing, and not knowing what that really was, I applied for it. Got email back the next day, went in for an interview, got the internship, and the rest is history! I felt in love with SEO =D
I started off a few years after graduating from the University of Arizona where I majored in entrepreneurship in 2000. I decided to turn my Father’s touchfree restroom supply business into an online business selling his products nationally via a website. While trying to learn the ins and outs of seo I worked with Joe Griffin for a while at submitawebsite.com where Joe introduced me to all the best seo forums and tutorials. Soon after that I had my Fathers business rocking on the search engines, and I have since opened up several e-commerce businesses that do very well. I also have an online insurance company, but have my seo company as a way to make extra income in my spare time. Having my seo company helps keep me on top of all the new seo techniques in the industry an allows me to grow as the best seo I can be.