A homework assignment for an Search Engine Optimization (SEO) class I am taking, is to write why I decided to learn SEO. This is something I have decided to do several times and could make for a long story. But an abbreviated version is below:
I started making my own websites about 20 years ago. I made a few sites but my most important was a website that hosted the computer games I created. Naturally I wanted to get as many visitors to my website as I could. I mean that was back in the days when most websites had a counter in the visitor saying “You are the XXX visitor to this site” so it was kind of a reputation thing.
After making a website for my computer games I started doing affiliate marketing. I would create a website based on a topic I was interested in, create some content of my own and hopefully get some reusable content from the ebook I was selling. Then link to the Clickbank page I was selling. Obliviously the more views I got the better so I spent quite a bit of time learning SEO.
Once I started going to college I didn’t have time for extra learning and we covered very little (if any) SEO in college. Didn’t do a ton of SEO in my first development position either. But after I started working for myself I realized that people didn’t want to pay me to design and develop a website that didn’t get any traffic. So I had to start optimizing these websites to bring in enough traffic to make it worthwhile for my client’s. However SEO had changed quite a bit and the things I used to do didn’t work so well anymore. So I started relearning what I was doing.
However once again a position change put my in a spot where I didn’t do SEO anymore. However in the last couple of years I am back in a spot where I work for a company that develops websites for clients that need to increase traffic to justify the expense of design and development. So here I am once again turning my focus back to SEO in order to over a more full service digital marketing menu.
