10 Years in the world of SEO, My Journey So Far...

Mid April 2010 will mark 10 years that I have been working in SEO. So far its been a long and enjoyable journey and the world of SEO is constantly changing which really helps to keep it interesting.

It was in 2000 April that I made the Journey to Kelowna, British Columbia to start on a new career in search marketing. The first half of my SEO career was with Enquiro Search Solutions aka Search Engine Position, located in Kelowna BC. Its surprising how much things have changed over the course of 10 years.

• Yahoo Directory was free to submit to, but getting listed was a bit of a wait.
• Inktomi was a big player with providing other search engines with a search engine database.
• Google was a very small player
• Overture was then call GoTo, and the lowest listing was 1 cent
• Doorway pages were huge along with the ole 1x1 hidden pixel trick
• Free For All link building was pretty big
• Google for awhile powered Yahoo's search results until Yahoo bought Inktomi and started using it in place of Google.
• Go.com was a bit of a bigger player, and they had GoGuides, the original version. I still remember having an account and trying to build up as many points as possible with submissions. Almost like a Video game for SEO Geeks now that  I recall.
• MSN use to use Inktomi's database (which Yahoo eventually bought), so you could see there was not as much diversity in the search engines as it is now. Surprisingly it was only the beginning of 2005 that they decided to switch over to their own database.

Google has made such a great impact over the years in forcing search engines to change how they work, and thank god. As much as some people might be going anti-google, them coming along did wonders in my opinion. It forced the other major search engines to realize that people actually want quality results when searching.

Overture (formely GoTo.com) also made a big difference with search marketing, and its now for a lot of companies become a part of their yearly marketing budget.

Yahoo has gone on a shopping spree with purchasing Alta Vista, AllTheWeb.com, Overture, and Inktomi just to name a few.

What I like about the search engines now, is that with the top 3 major players, those being MSN, Google and Yahoo, is that they all have their own database, so the results will actually differ from search engine to search engine. Good ole diversity.

My journey in SEO started in April 2000 with SearchEnginePosition.com (Enquiro Search Solutions, Inc.) (check out their websites, great SEO Research!) and I left them in the summer of 2004 to relocate to be closer to family and friends and thus started up my own SEO company in Newfoundland. So far the journey has been great and very interesting. It will be interesting to see how the search engines continue to grow and develop over the next few years.

Gerard Manning
Canadian Search Engine Marketing