45 Minutes.
Aug 24, 2009 seo
In five months I’ll be five.
Well, a five year old Internet Marketer. I’ve been a part of the internet movement for a lot longer; I’ve been coding and designing since before table layouts were popular, when web-rings were still all-the-rage and I remember using Yahoo! as my main search engine because Google was still infant trying to make it’s way in the world.
Which, it was slowly doing as it wormed its way through an underground of users, collecting more and more sites for it’s search engine directory. Yahoo! was still the predominate search engine; they had already acquired AltaVista and were using them to help bolster the search index they’d already created. There was a search engine battle coming, the mass of people just didn’t realize it would be a newcomer that would emerge victorious.
At the time I was addicted to design. I drew layouts in history class and code on my math homework (it was math, honest!) I attended a design college, geeking out over the latest design trend and feeling as if I and my contemporaries would revolutionize the face of web design.
As luck would have it I attended as guest speaker event where Search Engine Marketing was covered. It was a 45 minute class and rather rudimentary. It was 2004, Yahoo! was it’s own search engine again after having taking back it’s search engine results from Google. MSN was using Yahoo! as its search results provider and was eying Google, who was beginning to monopolize the industry. Directories were heavily utilized as were doorway page and keyword spamming; Ask Jeeves walked on scene and local search came into town. That was just the tip of the iceberg. Video search/media search and desktop search came out. In March an event that would change the face of searching rolled out: Personalized Search.
45 minutes changed my life, it would just take another four months before I realized it.
I graduated and started in a web design company within weeks: January 2, 2005 actually. I had no problems with designing and coding, still enamored with the lofty goal of design revolution. All I wanted to do was make the web a prettier place. A client had heard about this up-and-coming tactic called Search Engine Optimization. Seizing the opportunity was easier than I thought.
“Does anyone here know anything about something called SEO?”
I contemplated my reply. I had really only had 45 minutes worth of knowledge, something I mulled over in my head for about 5 seconds before shyly raising my hand, “Yes, I know what SEO is.”
I suppose the rest they say is history.
