My First #1 Google Ranking

Kevin Gibbons tagged me with an interesting little meme he started and since he’s a loyal reader of 10e20, here goes:

My first job right out of college, I went to work for a web design start-up. It was started by 4 guys with a lot of money and absolutely no clue about web design or really even the Internet in general. They wanted to get richer and thought this woould be a good way (at this time the original RazorFish was worth billions, Organic was trading at obscene amounts, etc). I stayed with the company for awhile but just got so sick of them not having a clue and wasting people’s money. So I left… I wanted to do something different…

So I went to work with a family friend who had a recording studio on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. It was a small place but he was an extremely talented engineer and producer. The recording studio business is tough though (especially in New York and with home recording studios, etc). My job was to get the word out about his studio. So the first thing I did was create a website (with the help of my brother and my wife). But I wanted it to be different then the crap I had seen at my other job – so I started reading everything I could find about SEO (with lots of it being Danny’s SearchEngineWatch).

Within a few short months (sounds crazy now doesn’t it?) I had his site ranking at the top of Google for just about any recording studio related term there was. He was ranking #1 for recording studio (above Abbey Road, Hit Factory, etc). Now with a small recording studio, you can only sell so much space/time – so it got to the point where we had to remove the phone number and you could only book through the site. My job was done and I moved on to creating 10e20….

PS> The guy eventually moved on completely from the studio (letting the website lapse) but he’s now doing major movie scores and a few hit records…