Good-bye, Danny and Thanks

August 30th, 2006 Jackie

Danny Sullivan is a legend in the search marketing industry. He launched  searchenginewatch.com back in 1997 and went on to develop and host the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conferences that have become must-attend media events in their own right.

Yesterday Danny announced that he will be leaving search engine watch. This news has shaken up SEOs and search marketers all over the globe. If you read the comments to Danny’s post or one of the many articles about Danny’s departure, you’ll quickly grow to understand that Danny was about as well-respected in the field as any one person can be. In fact, Google even appears shaken by the news.

I think it’s fitting to write a few words about how Danny has affected my career and helped to educate and inspire me. I started learning about search engine optimization in 1998, when I worked for a small Web shop that developed six-figure websites for pharmaceutical clients. When the clients started asking why they couldn’t find their big ticket sites on search engines like Yahoo and AltaVista, I was asked by my manager to “look into that.”

In 1998, I was a lowly writer/editor in charge of proof-reading web copy, but I loved it. One of my responsibilities was writing short Web site descriptions for submitting to directories such as Yahoo. It wasn’t a stretch to give me the task of figuring out why our overpriced Web sites weren’t showing up in search engines like AltaVista and Webcrawler.

I don’t remember what I typed into AltaVista (my search engine of choice back then) to find Danny’s website, but it didn’t take long for me to stumble upon Searchenginewatch.com. Back then it was sort of a teal blue and beige, and the most prominent link was “The Webmasters Guide to Search Engines.” I read the entire site.  Ubeknownst to me, my career was about to change.

Communicating what Danny taught me from the information he posted on Searchenginewatch.com became my mission. I worked with our site developers, designers and writers to impart the benefits of a search-engine friendly Web site to clients. I learned the value of well-written content versus flashy graphics and design, and to understand just how important my writing skills were in the Web world.

Thanks to Danny’s integrity, I learned the right way to optimize a Web site so that it would not get black listed by search engines and fall off the face of the Web. Still, my first ALT tag was about a paragraph long and spanned the width of the page.

That small Web shop where I’d worked full-time since 1997 was bought by a much larger direct marketing company which did not understand the Internet. The Web development division grew to about 100 people (in a year) and my little SEO service became a slightly larger SEO department.

I was promoted five times during the company’s heydey and given two empoyee achievement awards for innovation. At the height of it all, I attended one of the first SES conferences in New York (I think it was in 2000) and got to Shake Danny’s hand.

Danny’s enthusiasm, integrity and intelligence have raised the bar for all of us out here in the search marketing trenches. He’s given SEOs a voice, helping to pave the way for the industry and, for me personally, create a viable way to make a living that I can be proud of. I have no doubt that he will continue to do great things and impact the search world. His legacy will surely live on at Searchenginewatch.com and SES.

My one regret is that I never got back to SES after the first conference I attended in 2000. I’d actually planned to go to the New York conference this coming April and looked forward to possibly shaking Danny’s hand once again.

Danny, consider this post a cyber-shaking of the hand. You’ve truly made a difference in my career and my life. Thank you.

 

 

Entry Filed under: E-Marketing Advice