SEO is a true passion of mine. In 1997 I was in high school sitting next to a friend, my current business partner, Kevin Bailey. As usual, we weren’t interested much in the current discussion of our chemistry teacher and making small talk in the back of the class. Kevin handed me a check made out to him for around $800.00. I thought it was cool and asked him what it was for. Kevin told me that he would get checks like this every month and he didn’t do much to earn this money.

I was amazed seeing how many hours I had to put in delivering pizzas for Pappa John’s pizza to earn this same amount of money. Kevin told me to come over to his house after school and he would show me how this money was made.

At the time, most people that had Internet access were using dial-up services such as AOL. Some of these Internet service providers would offer their subscribers small amounts of storage space or hosting to create a personal website. Kevin used this free hosting to create a website on Dodge Vipers. After creating an amazing website for the time, Kevin wondered how to get others besides close friends and family to see his new website. After a quick search on Yahoo for Dodge Vipers, it didn’t take Kevin long to realize that if his website was one of the lucky ten to show up on the first page of the search results for Dodge Vipers that visitors would start pouring in.

After viewing the source code of other websites on the first page, Kevin quickly identified meta tags such as the title, meta description and keyword tag. Each of these contained the phrase Dodge Vipers among other popular phrases. Naturally, Kevin’s website also contained various keywords relating to Dodge Vipers throughout his website. Soon after replicating these techniques and submitting his new website to Yahoo many times, his website started to come up around page 2 or 3. Further research showed that reducing the file size of images and adding the Yahoo search code to the website gave Kevin’s Dodge Viper Speed Zone the extra attention it needed to make it to page 1 on Yahoo for Dodge Vipers.

After using a free tracking software, Kevin quickly realized that over 1000 people were visiting his website every day.

What’s next? Kevin wondered how he might be able to make money on such a website. After a little research relating to banner advertising, Kevin found two companies. These affiliate marketing networks were called Commission Junction and Clicktrade. These networks provided relevant banner ads that Kevin could add to his website and would pay anywhere from 10 to 15 cents per click. Kevin’s first month he made $500.00. Next month was $800.00 and at it’s peak the Dodge Viper Speed Zone was making $2500.00 per month. Kevin worked on finding more relevant ads, messing with ad placement and getting ranking for more keywords on Yahoo to increase the revenue.

Myself and another friend at the time, Aaron Aders, were very interested and made similar websites to generate advertising revenue. Family friends and Real Estate Agents quickly realized the power of this form of marketing and began offering to pay us to create websites and get them ranked for local real estate keyword phrases. Kevin, Aaron and I formed a small company with no formalities. This company had a short life before we each went to College. Aaron and Kevin went to Indiana University and I went off to Purdue University. I wonder who got the real education?

After graduating in 2003 from the School of Technology I went to work for the family business, NewPro Corp. As operations supervisor I had many tasks relating to shipping, purchasing, customer service and marketing. By this time the tech bubble had burst and Kevin’s website was making less than $70.00 per month. Online advertisers had backed out and the affiliate marketing companies we had dealt with had fallen by the wayside.

I decided to focus some of NewPro Corp.’s marketing budget on search engine optimization and eCommerce. I contracted with Matt Franklin of eCommerce Optimization to help NewPro find customers through the Internet’s new search engine, Google.

Matt Franklin, aka eCopt, became more than a contractor and helped me grasp the new way of optimizing for search engines. His mentor-ship helped me understand what I had missed in just 3 short years of not staying in tuned with metrics search engines such as Yahoo and Google were using to determine which websites ranked at the top of search results for given phrases.

Together, Matt Franklin and I took NewPro’s website from roughly 30 visitors per month to over 1000 visitors per day. Yes, that is over 1000 visitors per DAY. This did amazing things for the family business and had my father’s business associates asking, nearly begging for similar services.

Soon after this success I broke away from the family business and got back together with my old partners, Kevin Bailey and Aaron Aders. We now run a successful Internet marketing firm, Slingshot SEO, Inc.