Orange County SEO Expert

What qualifies a person to call themselves an “SEO Expert”? Is it all the blogs and newsletters one reads? Perhaps one attended a one-day workshop on search engine optimization or read a few books on the subject? Well, I’ve done all the above, but I don’t think they earned me the title Orange County SEO Expert.

I believe the only qualifier a person may use to claim rights to that title is results. I didn’t even enter the SEO realm until late 2003. Since then I’ve become addicted to this new breed of Internet marketing, and have made a lot of companies very happy by getting them to the top of the search results in Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and other smaller search engines.

Pre-Orange County SEO Expert Era

Before I started optimizing websites, I was a hobbiest webmaster with nearly 100 small business and personal websites under my belt. I’ve worked with PhotoShop, ImageReady, Dreamweaver, Flash, Illustrator, Anfy, Java, JavaScript, ASP, PHP, PDF, CGI, and most of all: Notepad. The problem with the beautiful sites I build was that none of them were making money. The websites all looked fantastic, but didn’t have an SEO best practices applied; in fact SEO still really didn’t have best practices yet. So handed over my webmaster baton and stood in line for an SEO Expert baton.

This isn’t a resume of any sorts, but so you don’t think I’m some nobody trying to convince you of these great things, allow me to give you some background of my employment history:

• 1993 - 1997: US Army Infantry (Fort Hood, TX)
• 1997 - 2002: PacifiCare Health Systems [IT] (Cypress, CA)
• 2002 - 2005: IBM Global Services (Costa Mesa, CA)
• 2005 - 2005: Paciolan / eVenue.net (Irvine, CA)
• 2006 - 2007: Disney Parks and Resorts Online (Burbank, CA)
• 2007 - 2008: Boutique Internet Services Firm (Calabasas, CA)
• 2008 - Present: Elaborate SEM (Irvine, CA)

Each job helped me learn more about Internet-based businesses. I hung out with marketing people, networked with the IT guys, and took lots and lots of notes. After work, I went home and studied how to become an Orange County SEO Expert. I had lots of websites to work with so pretty soon, SEO became second nature.

Why am I still working a day job? SEO is like real estate, sometimes it’s up, sometimes it’s down. I’m a family man with a wife and two kids, so I don’t like the feeling of not knowing if there’s a check in the mail or not.

My education is in E-Business. I hold a Bachelor of Science Degree from Westwood College of Technology in Anaheim. My major was E-Business Management and I was considered a “model student” who graduated with honors and an “Outstanding Student” Award. My school was so impressed with my ability to work, go to school, be a webmaster, and a community volunteer, that they nominated me for the 2006 CCA G.R.E.A.T. Award, which I won earlier in March of 2006. I was also the honorary speaker at the 2006 Graduation Ceremony for the college.

So how does all this qualify me as an Orange County SEO Expert? Let’s talk about results. In 2005, I accepted a 90 day contract with Quest International, Inc. in Irvine, CA. They needed a “Search Engine Optimizer”, which to me meant “SEO Expert” so I took the job. Quest has several thousands of products and they needed me to make sure that their website came up #1 on Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. So I worked side by side with their programmer and together we applied my SEO Best Practices to their template and created litterally thousands of static pages using proprietary software. Check out some of the results below, keep in mind that I haven’t touched the site since December of 2005:

Screenshots Taken on May 8, 2006 for Keywords:

• SEO Expert Results for: medical monitors
• SEO Expert Results for: medical monitors repair
• SEO Expert Results for: medical monitor sales
• SEO Expert Results for: medical monitor loaners
• SEO Expert Results for: medical monitor exchange program
• SEO Expert Results for: nec md series lcds
• SEO Expert Results for: nec large screen lcds
• SEO Expert Results for: totoku medical monitors
• SEO Expert Results for: industrial monitor loaners
• SEO Expert Results for: industrial monitor exchange
• SEO Expert Results for: medical docking stations

Try more keywords by using Quest International’s sitemap at http://www.questinc.com/sitemap.html. Nearly all of their products are #1 - #3 when used with “repair” or “repair services”.

Awards for This Orange County SEO Expert

I had no idea that having a passion for something I enjoy so much could be so rewarding. This year, as mentioned above, I was the 2006 recipient of the CCA GREAT Award. GREAT stands for Graduate Recognition for Excellence, Achievement and Talent. My family and I were flown out to Washington DC in March to accept the award. You can read more about that at my homepage, another Orange County SEO Expert website.

Thanks for reading this long history of me. I hope you enjoyed the case study above and have found a new interested in this search engine optimization industry. Please feel free to use my contact form if you are interested in a consultation.

Kind Regards,
Steve Wiideman