I’m an Atlanta SEO consultant and founder of Leverable. Organic search has been a part of my life since the late 1990’s when I built my first website and started analyzing the server logs. The search industry has grown, and I have too. But my mission to help businesses thrive through SEO strategies I’ve learned remains strong.
Brands I’ve engaged with:
- Wounded Warrior Project
- Extended Stay America
- The Home Depot
- A Small Orange
- Rooms To Go
- Chick-fil-A
- EarthLink
- GameStop
- IHG
Journey To SEO Consultant
I came of Internet age in the mid 1990’s when Yahoo was the top search engine and business.com was available for registration for $50. To get your content live you had to build the site in static HTML first before you worried about promoting it.
I miss what the web was then, a frontier of discovery too young and innocent to be commercialized. And one where personal sites regularly appeared in search results. What few SEO consultants there were hung out in online forums and were too geeky for mainstream businesses.
I started noodling around with WordPress 1.0 and soon became enamored with blogging. One of my great loves has been expressing myself through writing. I wrote fiction, poetry, PC gaming reviews, political opinion and my Christian experience. I had fun just creating graphics and tools for visitors to my site to download for free. And all this was amplified by the great bullhorn of search engine optimization.
My interest in SEO began after poking around in server log files and observing the traffic that certain pages were receiving. These questions began to motivate my curiosity and continue to drive my exploration into SEO today:
- Why did some of the pages receive more traffic from search engines than others?
- How could I make the pages receive more traffic?
- How might I monetize this traffic?
I learned that one of the early methods for SEO was to add meta tags to Web pages with the desired keywords and so, I wrote a meta tag maker software program called “Metty” to take care of this task. Of course, search engine optimization has evolved far past meta data and on page copy.
Whenever I designed websites, I learned to build in the underlying layer of SEO elements to make them perform in organic search. To my excitement, I discovered that sites I built could often compete with big brand names and even beat them for high volume search terms. I became fascinated with the ability of the little guy to make a big splash on the Internet. That fascination soon led me to a professional career developing SEO strategies for some of those top brands and Atlanta search marketing agencies.
As SEO evolved through the years and became more mainstream, I learned to adapt my optimization strategies to include more technical SEO, content strategy, authority building and analytics. The foundation of my knowledge came from tweaking and experimenting done in my spare time, learning from friends and reading SEO forums and blogs. Those early SEO experiments served to ground me. The thought processes that came from them would prove valuable in helping clients achieve results throughout my journey as an SEO consultant.
I share my deepest thoughts and ideas on our blog (subscribe here) and on LinkedIn and X.
What Can I Do for You?
Get in touch with me at emory at leverable dot com