How did you get into SEO?

[rmccarley]

What was your background before getting into SEO?

[dazzlindonna]

Was a coldfusion programmer. Developed some apps and needed to get them in the rankings. Discovered SEO.

There's a whole lot more in between all of that, but that's the short story.

[Too Bad]

I am not into 'SEO'.

We're mainly a business that creates IT solutions involving internet.

I found out that 'SEO' is the perfect way to market (technical) webstrategies like W3/RFC compliant internet technology. People rather buy a commercial webstrategy then a technical one. Even though it all comes down to the same thing.

[toddieg]

i was doing web development.

one time my boss told me he wants me to go to an 'SEO' training seminar to learn how to get our sites ranked. he paid someone he knew, they gave me a crash course, and within months i learned there was much more dough in it than working for him

obviously - i quit...
now it's ironic cuz i'm in direct competition with the guys who trained me YEARS ago...

[Wit]

I was a "player", and AAMOF I still am

[Robert Paulson]

Brick and Mortar.

Built the company.

Built the company website.

Grew from there....

[Bruno]

i have open my website statistics once

[jadibones]

I started in web design back in 1997 as an intern. Back then I had no clue about search engines. That turned into a job. Then I moved to San Diego and worked at another web firm downtown. I never really picked up on any SEO tactics until 1999 when I moved back to Charleston (SC) and built a website for an A&E weekly newspaper. Back then my idea of SEO was adding a bunch of keywords in black text with a black background somewhere on the pages and using keywords in the META tags.

I didn't really get into serious SEO until I started doing some SEO work for a law firm (finding links) about 2 years ago. From there things went pretty slowly until I started a few commercial websites of my own about a year and 1/2 ago. That really makes you dive into SEO. Got into the forums. Started using all the tools. Got some software.

I liked it so much that I started SEOlogs.com about 7 months ago. Im definitely still learning though. I feel like being involved in SEOrefugee from the start is really helpful because there are no stupid posts. Everything is new.

[toddieg]

before i was labeled a 'search engine specialist' i was just an 'internet marketer'

in other words i just found ways to get traffic to websites - i did this by

-submitting to directories
-press releases
-buying high traffic link advertisments
-sending out emails (before it became illegal 'spam')
-doing PPC ads
-banner exchanges
-dumping links in chat rooms
-IMing people links
-forum link advertising
-creating sweepstakes / contests / giveaways

little did i know that this actually turned out to be SEO ; i was doing it all along - sometimes with little or no anchor text, but still doing it....

truth is, i'm pretty sure if the search engines didn't exist i could still find plenty of ways to market a site online, and that's all that matters : traffic from Google, Yahoo and MSN are just added bonuses.

it's pretty funny to think about now: how i used to use automated bots to spam users in AOL chat rooms ... today that would never fly

[rmccarley]

Originally Posted by toddieg

truth is, i'm pretty sure if the search engines didn't exist i could still find plenty of ways to market a site online, and that's all that matters : traffic from Google, Yahoo and MSN are just added bonuses.

That's how I feel. Since I didn't trust SEO until recently I became really good at finding *other* methods of promoting web sites, especially offline. As it is, 14thC gets less than 5% of its traffic from the SEs. Almost 70% is direct refferer. Of course there are some pretty obvious reasons for that.

Maybe I'll add some "search-bait" down the line. But for now, I like writting about what I want to write about.