Search Engine Marketing - John Alexander Interviews SEO author Susan O'Neil about the early days.

Robin Nobles was the very first person to develop a structured
series of comprehensive courses and lessons which are recognized
and approved by the US educational system for training people in
search engine marketing skills. Robin Nobles celebrates her 6th
year in the online Web training business with her ever popular
SEO certification courses at http://www.onlinewebtraining.com.

Hattiesburg, MS (PRWEB) July 15, 2004 -- Today we bring you the
4th in a series of interviews conducted by Robin's business
partner John Alexander, who is looking up some of Robin's very
earliest online students and asking them about their
recollections of what it was like building SEO skills way back in
1998 and how far they've come in the SEO industry since then.

John Alexander: "Welcome Susan O'Neil, I'd really like to thank
you for taking the time to speak with us today. Susan, you had
some background in marketing before you started into the search
engine marketing industry.Could you tell us a little about your
background and how you first got thinking about search engine
marketing?"

Susan O'Neil: "I began my career in marketing in 1975 as Director
of Public Relations with a symphony orchestra. From there I went
to Wall Street where I was National Advertising Manager for Paine
Webber. When I moved to New Hampshire, I opened a public
relations agency, which is where I first got involved with the
Internet when a client company launched an e-mail service."

John Alexander: "Could you take us back and share some memories
of the early days? How did you first find Robin Nobles online
courses in the beginning?"

Susan O'Neil: "I was helping a few of my PR clients with text for
their websites and began experimenting with Meta tags and content
alterations. The more I learned about the power of optimization,
the more I realized that I didn't know it all. That's when I
searched for an online SEO course and found Robin Nobles. Her
expertise and her passion for her work inspired me then and it
still inspires me now."

John Alexander: "That's very nice and I know exactly what you
mean. Could you tell us how long after your initial training was
it, before you began realizing your true SEO skills and begin
helping people with their Web visibility challenges?"

Susan O'Neil: "I had a good deal of early success back them by
just applying the basics that I'd picked up through trial and
error. This was easy to do in the mid to late 90's. However, once
I finished Robin's course in 1998, I was able to implement a more
aggressive program that could better serve the most competitive
types of e-commerce sites. Also, through Robin and her students,
I found a forum that allowed me to share and learn from peers --
so important in the then-emerging industry. Previous to that,
doing SEO was a pretty lonely job since few realized this field
of marketing even existed."

John Alexander: "That is very interesting to see how far this
goes back. Robin's vision for a forum has always been to create
an ideal place where people can share information safely together
and she has always been so good at bringing the very best talents
out in people. I should mention just for our readers sake, that
her newest efforts in this regard just recently has been to
fashion an excellent networking community called the World
Resource Center at http://www.sew-wrc.com."

John Alexander: "Susan, I was reading a copy of your book which
you co-authored with Robin Nobles and noted that in the preface,
it says that you two actually wrote "Maximize Web site Traffic"
without ever actually meeting in person. Can you tell us how this
came about?"

Susan O'Neil: "As I helped more and more of my PR clients move
onto the Web through optimized websites, I realized that there
was a need for a corporate, comprehensive approach to providing
professional SEO services to America's companies. I decided to
create such a company and, in 1998, closed my PR agency and
launched @Web Site Publicity. In order to give my new company
quick credibility and exposure, I decided to write a book on SEO
- a "how to" book. Knowing how time-consuming the writing would
be, I asked Robin to share the endeavor with me."

John Alexander: "And this was the beginning of this new book?"

Susan O'Neil: "Yes, she agreed to the idea, so we divvied up the
chapters and started writing. We didn't meet until it was time to
do the final edit. Robin flew up from Mississippi to a ski
chalet in Vermont where we typed and talked non-stop for a week.
Robin brought a great depth of specific SEO experience which
mixed beautifully with my years of marketing experience and the
result was a book that, outdated as it is, still brings us fan
mail!"

John Alexander: "That is very cool! Now as you know, last month
just as of June 29, 2004 Robin Nobles has been celebrating her
sixth year in the SEO Training industry with her online
(www.onlinewebtraining.com) instructional courses in search
engine optimization. Looking back to the early days when you
first decided to study search engine marketing, can you describe
what your SEO skillset has meant to you personally? How much have
these skills meant to you?

Susan O'Neil: "Because of my SEO skills and my marketing
expertise, I and my staff have been able to help hundreds of
small to large businesses succeed on the Internet. This remains
exciting and gratifying. Our clients were also better able to
ride out the dot.com bust because our approach to providing SEO
services has been to focus on the long term "health" of a
website, which means building quality content continuously. Robin
in her teaching and, together, in our book - we've never strayed
from the truism that "content is king" and that continues to
serve my clients well."

John Alexander: "Can you tell our readers about one of your
earliest SEO success stories and what it felt like the first time
you made a real difference to someone's business online?"

Susan O'Neil: "A longtime PR client of mine is a publisher of
fine nonfiction for children. This company was early in
recognizing the power of the Internet and so invested in a
delightful, informative website that also offered subscriptions
to their magazines. However, after spending the money to build
the website, they didn't get any visitors. I liken it to giving
birth after a long labor to a beautiful new baby that no one
comes to admire. Aware of their concerns, I starting tweaking
tags, cleaning up code, and adding content and their site began
to take off. That early first client has remained with my
company all these years and has been generous in their
recommending of us to others as they continue to grow their
online business."

John Alexander: "What word of wisdom or advice do you have for
any of our readers that might be considering building a new
career in search engine marketing these days?"

Susan O'Neil: "I don't think you can be in marketing today
without at least an understanding of search marketing concepts,
even if you don't build the code and write the content. As this
"new" science of SEO has become not only universally accepted but
consistently praised for its cost-effective strategies, there
will continue to be opportunities for people who can apply
consistent, aggressive, yet ethical strategies for growing online
success, both in-house for e-commerce companies and with SEO/SEM
agencies like mine. In fact, my agency is growing still and when
I hire someone who may have a great marketing background but be
new to SEO, I have them start their learning curve with one of
Robin's courses because no one can lay out the ground work
better."

John Alexander: "How nicely spoken, Susan."

Susan O'Neil: "The other word of advice I have is an old one:
don't believe everything you read. SEO newsletters and forums are
great starting points and can be entertaining, but the people
with the best information don't go giving it away. Whatever you
hear or read, never apply a strategy to a client's site without
thoroughly testing it first extensively. We developed our own E-
Commerce Lab for just this purpose."

John Alexander: "Finally in closing, I'll ask if you have any
other favourite online resources you would care to mention for
the benefit of our readers?

Susan O'Neil: "As my company has grown, my responsibilities have
shifted from trying to discern the optimum number of words on a
Google-friendly page or the best marketing spin in a title tag,
to focusing on the bigger picture, so I'm not a good one to
recommend the best SEO reading today. Instead, as I lead my team
into our 7th year of business, I'm reading the Wall Street
Journal, Forbes and the UK's Financial Times, always trying to
look beyond the bend - to try to see where business in general is
going and the Internet specifically. To keep our clients ahead of
their competition, we need to keep ahead of ours.

John Alexander: "That is so very true. Well, I want to thank you
again so much Susan O'Neil, for taking time today to share some
of your rememberances of the early days of search engine
marketing and telling us how you first got in to the business. It
has been fascinating to speaking to you and I'll just take this
opportunity wish you the very greatest of ongoing success in the
future."

This interview has been brought to you courtesy of John
Alexander, Co-director of Training and Education at Search Engine
Workshops (http://www.searchengineworkshops.com) and Online Web
Training(http://www.onlinewebtraining.com).