The SEO Interviews

John Audette

John Audette, (currently of Audette Media) one of the fathers of search was doing SEO before it had a name, before people knew what it was, before spider run search engines existed! You get the point; it was a long time ago, 1995 to be exact. John began his internet marketing career by writing a book that he attempted to have published but he could not find any takers. So he published the book himself and sold it online. With the revenue from the book sales, John started MMG (Multi-Media Marketing Group).

Adam Audette

Adam may well be the first 'second generation internet marketer'. He got his start in 1996 working for his family's marketing company, MMG, with clients such as Intel, IBM, Art.com, and Microsoft. Since then he’s worked with many companies developing marketing and community strategies, including MSN, Zappos and Jeld-Wen. Adam's moderated the LED Digest, a discussion list for internet marketing and SEO, since 1997. He also moderates the SEM 2.0 group and is active on many industry sites.

 

Greg Boser

Greg Boser (aka WebGuerilla and half of the SEO Rockstars duo) is known for telling it like it is. His website comment policy is, “Don’t be a dumbass!” You get the point. So how did Greg get his start in the industry and how did he go from “squeaky clean” (according to Greg himself) to one of the industry’s rebels?

Christine Churchill

Christine was a missile officer in the military. Her daily activities consisted of running computer simulations of missile trajectories and deployments sites. She was part of the team that selected deployment sites for Desert Storm and other targets in the Middle East. Due to the nature of her job she became known as the techie geek by her co-workers. So when her boss needed a website for an upcoming conference, Christine was who he came to. Christine had never created a website before and she only had a month before the conference. She found some resources and built a “pretty hideous site” she reflects, using frames.

Bruce Clay

Bruce Clay, president and CEO of Bruce Clay Inc. considers himself fortunate to have participated in the formation of an industry. “How many people can say that?” Bruce asks in an anything but boisterous way. Bruce started his business in 1996 when he got serious and decided that this was going to be a real business. By “this” he says, there was no name, the few people doing search engine optimization at the time called it different things.

Brent Csutoras, Todd Malicoat & Chris Winfield

Brent Csutoras, Todd Malicoat and Chris Winfield are the three musketeers of search, if you will. Through their years in the trenches of SEO they have become each other’s support systems, offering business and SEO advise whenever a comrade is in need. Together they sat down at SES New York 2008 to reflect and reminisce about how they began and developed their SEO careers. The one piece of advice they all have, build a network of experienced and trusted friends in the search industry. That has made all the difference to them.

Damien Finlay

Damien Finlay is the Managing Director at Epiar, a search engine optimization, marketing and copywriting firm. Originally, Damien worked at Oracle in database architecture. In 2004, on a visit to Edmonton, Alberta, Damien saw an advertisement for a Search Analyst and Account Manager for young company called Epiar.
 

Michael Gray

Michael Gray, aka Graywolf began his SEO career in 1998 while working for a jewelry and home furnishings business. He was hired as their in-house developer and stumbled into search and SEO by trying to solve issues with their online store. Through his experience with online retail, Michael took his engineering background and turned himself into a self-taught programmer and SEO expert.

Andre Jensen

Also know as Andre the Search Giant, Andre Jensen is a seasoned veteran in the Online Marketing industry who also got his start with the core CompUSA folks in the mid-1990s. His real start in SEO centered on something as basic as parenting. In fact, his ticket to being hired at Multimedia Marketing Group started with the curiosity of marketing his parenting site online, andrejr.com.
 

Detlev Johnson

Detlev Johnson is one of the early pioneers in search engine marketing and web optimization services. Originally a musician, he played guitar in a band called Jr. Johnson and the Mystics. Known as the “Guitar God” he taught lessons in a room upstairs at the old “Music Village” in Bend, Oregon.
 

Lee Odden

Lee Odden, is the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. TopRank is a search marketing agency integrating natural search optimization with social media marketing and new media public relations. Lee is also the CEO and co-owner with Sue Misukanis of Misukanis & Odden, Ltd., a full service marketing and public relations firm based in Minneapolis.
 

Jeremy Sanchez

Jeremy Sanchez, co-owner of Global Strategies International, (acquired by Ogilvy in March of 2007) got his start in search engine optimization (SEO) as John Audette’s Executive Assistant in 1997 at the Multi-Media Marketing Group (MMG) in Bend, Oregon.

Marshall Simmonds

As chief search strategist for the New York Times Company Marshall Simmonds has been predicting the end of search since he started doing it in 1997. As we all know, Marshall’s expectations of the search engines’ progression has proved wrong but he still believes it will happen someday. The search engines are still really bad about figuring out what content on websites is about and until the engines are able to extract and classify data effectively, educating journalist, writers, editors and producers to write content for SEO is going to be vital, said Marshall.

Danny Sullivan

Renowned search guru, nonchalantly says that he was a newspaper reporter that saw the web, liked what he saw and decided to leave newspapers and start working with a friend developing websites. A humble beginning with an exceptional future, Danny explains that he simply stumbled upon search. One of their first clients asked why they weren’t ranking tops in 1995. There weren’t any good answers at the time so Danny began digging for information. The following year, Danny published his findings on the web, as The Webmaster’s Guide to Search Engines.

Jill Whalen

In the early 90’s, Jill Whalen was a stay-at-home mom with three kids. Being an early adopter of the internet, she started a parenting chat room to connect with parents across the country. To her surprise, the chat room became so popular that she got requests daily to start a website. Self taught Jill created her own parenting website. Once Parentsroom was on the net, Jill began attempting to get it to rank higher so that new people could find it.

Derrick Wheeler

There are a few SEO early birds that got their start at CompUSA in Portland, Oregon and Derrick Wheeler was one of them. He can still get you discounts on Windows! His start in SEO in the mid-1990’s was prompted by a co-worker at the time, Marshall Simmons, when Marshall left CompUSA to join a little company called Multimedia Marketing Group in Bend, Oregon. Little did Derrick know that the move would prompt a the journey that years later would give him the title of Senior SEO Architect for Microsoft.com.