My Marketing and SEO Background
I don’t think it is appropriate for me to start off this Blog without explaining my background in SEO and where I have come from in Internet Marketing. I have been involved with online marketing since college and in 2001 I started Click Squad with my friend Ed Shull whom I worked with at myGeek.com.
myGeek.com was a 2nd tier Pay Per Click search engine and while I had a good time working there and enjoyed working with some of the people there, the business had pretty much no future and really didn’t convert well for any of our clients, not that many of our clients even tracked conversion anyway. I got laid off at myGeek.com and immediately started re-selling WhenU with Ed for our new company Click Squad. WhenU was honestly one of the greatest services I have ever sold in Online Marketing. WhenU was one of the first Adware pop-up companies when pop-ups were rarely seen and the conversion rates were phenomenal. Who wouldn’t want to purchase a pop-up of your advertisement that displayed on your competitor’s website. Yes, it was slightly unethical but in all technicality it was legal. Although, we all know where Adware services went, the way of the dinosaur and I do apologize to anyone that is still selling them.
Once WhenU stopped converting to the level that was satisfactory to our clients and we tried other Adware networks that worked for a little while but eventually fell to the same uninspiring conversion rates of their predecessors. Somewhere around this time, who really remembers, we acquired the rights to the domain name www.USWeb.com from the estate attorney for the former web development giant that declared bankruptcy. Not only was this a huge coup for us from a branding perspective but we bought the domain for astronomically low price. The hidden value, besides changing our company to a great brand name USWeb, was the value of all the backlinks to the website because of who USWeb was in this industry. Without much effort at all we were able to rank for some of the most competitive Keyword phrases in Online Marketing.
With the slow death of Adware pop-ups upon us we needed something new at USWeb to pay for all our indiscretions. We were able to secretly start a new service with an inside man at iCrossing. At the time I didn’t even know his name, he actually had a secret identity for quite some time, for the life of me I can’t remember what it was. Our secret weapon was eventually laid off from iCrossing because their CEO was apparently insane and Chad Horstman became our SEO guru. We started by selling an SEO cloaking service. I didn’t know much about SEO at the time and didn’t realize that it was even unethical. All I knew was that the service converted amazing for our clients and we were able to achieve top rankings for tons of long-tail Keyword phrases but also some of the most competitive Keywords out there. It also didn’t hurt that we were passing Page Rank from links that we acquired on Forbes.com. We did work with high-end companies on this service and always got them ranked for phrases that were very targeted to their business.
If you been around this industry for a while you already know that the methods we utilized for our cloaking service were completely destroyed by a Google algorithm update. We needed to act quick and re-invent ourselves once again. We started to get more involved with Natural SEO when we were working with Forbes and decided that would be the main service we offered moving forward. We did amazing things with Forbes and took them from an extremely small amount of traffic from organic search to almost 50% of all their traffic coming from organic search. Forbes lead to a slew of other major publishing companies such as CNET, Time, Inc., Dow Jones and VNU eMedia. Life was great for us as an SEO company working with major publishers. Publishing websites like these were a dream because all you had to do was optimize the websites and their templates and it was only a matter of time before they increased their organic traffic by 30% to 50% and sometimes much higher.
What we still couldn’t accomplish was take a website that had no popularity and get it to rank at the top of the search engines for all their important Keyword phrases. At the time Blogging was just starting to become really popular, which was only about 2 years ago, seems like forever at this point. Ed came up with an idea to pay Bloggers to put links on their Blogs for our clients. I took the lead on the project and by hand and a spreadsheet started what became Blogitive. Blogitive.com was the first website out there that paid Bloggers to write in their Blogs and just link to a client’s website. The service was a dream but since we were a high-end SEO company we didn’t want to advertise what we were doing because we knew Google would eventually do something to take away the power of what we were able to accomplish. The service still works well but differently than it did when we first started. We are much stricter about the Blogs in our network because you have to be now. Some, insert well known company, ruined the party for the rest of us and Google was forced to make changes that made our lives much more difficult.
Right now I am in the process of starting a new link building service for our company. We call it Advanced Link Building, really this service is the tried and true method of acquiring links from related websites to our clients. This is one of the most effective ways of doing link building since Google was introduced. The methods and intricacies have definitely evolved over the years but it essentially what has always been done. The links we acquire for our clients are more expensive than what they got from Blogitive but they are also 5 to 10 times more powerful, you wouldn’t believe some of the results we have achieved.
During this whole time that we evolved into the SEO company we are today I have also become in expert in SEO. I can optimize websites myself at this point and I have also been doing a ton of research on link building and the latest trends and intricacies of the algorithm. Through this Blog I will talk about some of the tactics we would suggest to clients on how to take advantage of organic search. Quite honestly there is a lot of...