No laughing!
Everyone has that very first project that got them started in the search engine marketing scene. For me, it was a little partnership between me and a camera repair shop in New Jersey using a domain name I happened to own. Unfortunately, today, I have little time for it anymore; and, sadly its rankings have been falling. Of course I still own the keyword "camera repair," but that's far from what I had in its heyday. As a college kid I was banking many thousands per month in my share of the profits.
That paid for my beer and pizza many times over.
Web Pages like these used to dominate the long tail of camera-related queries like "nikon f camera repair," and "olympus camedia repair." Unfortunately, the combination of sparse content on the pages and few actual inbound links has now relegated them to the dreaded supplemental index. Thank you, Google.
I suppose the link whore in me has motivated this post, but I'm curious if anyone would like to reveal any of their very first SEO projects? Leave a comment. I promise I won't make fun!
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This has been my first real search engine marketing project and it is only recent as well! Until i started my SEO project she was getting maybe 1 enquiry every couple of months. The next four days after i spent a whole sunday submitting her to the search engines, directories, link farms etc she received an enquiry a day. That result pretty much got me hooked on Search Engines!
When I started in 1994 my first web pages were optimized for search. I thought it was just part of building a proper page. The one that would qualify as a project was when I created the first online music portal. It was a subscription publication named “POP-I†on CD-Rom that my partner Ross Teasly had created and I converted it to online usage. An editor from Rolling Stone with “Addicted to Noise†was the next online music eZine as we called them. The third one to go online was called Launch, now on Yahoo, and they also had a CD-Rom version that people subscribed to. I came up with the brilliant idea of putting links on the CD to pages online. I called these Internet CDs. We would put the word music at the bottom of the page about fifty times, submit to the search engine, I think it was Alta Vista, go to lunch and come back and see if we had a number one placement. When someone would place higher we would add the word music a few more times. We calculated density by getting a word count then count the keyword using the document search feature to find the keyword. Using a calculator we would figure out the keyword density. We moved to a fractional T-1 and in about a week had over 50,000 visitors per day. The first advertiser was Zima and our first affiliate was Earthlink. Earthlink did not know how to track the referrals online so the new subscriber would fill out an online form and have a disk sent to them in the mail. Earthlink kept a box of disks with my tracking number on them to ship. I think this might have been the second affiliate program online after CD-Now. I will be putting some of those early music interviews up on http://www.My-Entertainment-News.com as soon as I get around to it. They were the early versions of podcasts and UTube. Reading about your first project brought back memories. Thanks
My first SEO was an accident. I put up a new web site in 1994, with a database feeding pages in response to on-site search. I decided that using a DB for repetitive queries was more wasteful than doing a static dump of all the pages, with a decent naming scheme. Using static pages meant that you could find what you needed by just following the links, a usability win. Then, within a few weeks, we had strange questions from people who had identified us as being the authoritative resource - because we beat the vendors own pages. After those queries, we were then included in results with searches for people looking for "X rated images". So I got interested in the ways in which search can be abused and users confused, too.
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