How I Got Started In An SEO Career

**Welcome to the How I Got Started in SEO Blog Tag. I decided after creating this post that I would turn it into a tag. This is pretty simple to do. Simply make a blog post with the following:

1. How you got Started in SEO
2. List down 5 people and link to them who you want to blog tag and request them to tell their story how they got started in SEO. Although if you are not listed in my 5 people, feel free to still participate here if you want.
3. Link to where you read this story.

I think it would be cool to see how each one of us got into this business :)

So, having said that, here is my story:

We have a few new interns starting this week and it got me a little nostalgic for my own beginning in the world of SEO. Back in 1999, I hadn't touched a computer since 1992 when I was trying unsuccessfully to focus on my computer science major at San Diego State (which I didn't get because I chose to spend 7 years playing guitar in my band and working in guitar stores). But in 1999 I had grown weary of guitar stores (or it might have been my manager) and I wanted to try something new. So I got a job at an Internet service provider called Simply Internet. They were a little bit bigger of an operation back then as dial up was still in its prime and Web design was something that people were just starting to hear about. I thought it was a cool job cause I got to hang out on a computer all day and I just had to call people and ask them how their service was. If anything was wrong, I just transferred them to customer service. Pretty easy job really. And since it took me all of about 5 minutes to master, I had a lot of time on my hands between calls.

So that's when I decided to do a Web site for my band and bought my first domain (with the help of Digital Point owner Shawn Hogan, who also got his start is a way at Simply Internet but that's a different story) called www.heavymusic.com which is still my band's site to this day. I taught myself HTML thanks to htmlgoodies.com (which used to look a lot cooler by the way) and made a site for myself using Dreamweaver (seriously... it really was a legal copy).

At the time, I was just interested in getting more people to hear my music. So once the site was built and I was only getting 2 people a day (me and my office friend) to the site, I started to wonder how to attract more visitors. And it didn't take me long to look to the search engines. That's when I discovered a program called Web Position that showed me where my site was ranked in Altavista which was the number one search engine of that time (times sure do change..lol). And from there I started reading everything I could about SEO including this article that really changed the way I thought about search.

So after a lot of long hours of trial and error that included uploading homepage files with a 33K modem I started to get traffic to the site. And after hundreds of hours over the course of about 6 months, I was able to get my site positioned #1 in Altavista for the word MP3. Wanna see what it looked like? LOL. Here it is. As you can see, we I was also experimenting with affiliate marketing. But I did end up making about $40,000 when it was all said and done from all this stuff which was enough money at the time to help me move to the beach and start my career in SEO.

From there I went to baby products (#1 in Google for Baby Cribs while I was at that company) and then into the travel business which is when I really started to get into Google and Page Rank and a lot more of what is now modern SEO. I was able to position that company #1 for "New York Hotels" and #3 for "Las Vegas Hotels" while I was there in addition to thousands more top 10 listings (we had over 50 sites).

And from there, I came here to BusinessOnLine, where I now get to work with some of the biggest brands in the world. It's been quite a journey, and the coolest part is, that it's really only just beginning. The changes in this industry are amazing and are measured in months rather than years. And I think that's what I like most about it. It never gets boring cause there is always something new and the people who work in search are crazy just like me...lol. Plus I really get to use some of the computer skills I learned in college, which I know would make my late grandfather happy and proud.

And here I the SEO Legends I am tagging:

Bruce Clay - One of the first Guru's I ever met.

Greg Boser - The coolest guy in search and a lot of fun to have a beer with. Thank God he changed his domain to something I could spell!

Lora Lufark (SexySEO) - The name says it all.

Joost - One of the smartest dudes in search and able to leap tall buildings with a single snippet of code (optimized for performance of course).

Rand Fishkin - Often mistaken for the guy in the beer commercial: "the most interesting man in the world".