Hey there, I’m John. I have an aggressive hunger and thirst for all that life has to offer. Occasionally I document my experiences here on this ol’ blog.
I use this site to tie together all of my activity on the web – blogging, photography, SEO, design, and everything in between.
I’m a hard working individual and I love the work that I do. Internet marketing and SEO are more than just a job to me – they’re personal hobbies of mine, and I love reading about them and staying on top of the latest trends and techniques.
I’ve been making websites since I was in the 8th grade (1998?). I started off with AOL’s hosting, and once I learned some HTML I graduated to Angelfire. As I learned more and grew tired of storage limits/ads, I moved my site onto a friend’s server.
At this point I was posting updates on my site multiple times a day – I was “blogging”, before it was ever referred to as such. Fancy CMS software like WordPress didn’t exist at the time; I updated my site by hand whenever I wanted to create a new post, and eventually graduated to Greymatter’s “Newspro”, which oddly enough seems to have all but disappeared from the web. This experience gave me a unique background in content creation and management, and I appreciate the simplicity of WordPress that much more as a result.
I wrote about my exploits at school and all the dumb trouble I got myself into, and posted all sorts of strange/funny things that I found on the web. I wrote about movies that I saw, concerts that I attended, the things I did on the weekends, metal albums that I was obsessing over, and life in general. People really seemed to take a liking to what I was doing – I got lots of positive feedback, and before I knew it my site had a legitimate following.
I knew nothing of SEO at the time, but found myself dealing with increasingly large amounts of traffic. After my site was mentioned on several radio stations and subsequently pulled by my host for crashing the server on which it resided, I learned about analytics software (extreme-dm.com was the best available to me at the time) so that I could determine where my visitors were coming from, what they were looking at, and how I could use this information to my advantage. I became obsessed with this data – I loved coming home from school and discovering that I was receiving traffic from a new source, or learning that a new search query was sending visitors my way.
As a teenager, whenever I found a website with a cool design, I’d read the source code until I figured out how they accomplished it. On many occasions, I’d print out source code and read through it when I wasn’t at a PC. Needless to say, I probably spent too much time on the computer growing up, but I’ve found that as a result I am very resourceful and have a good general technical background.
I majored in art (with a concentration in graphic design) at Shippensburg University and entered the workforce as a web designer. Through an interesting chain of events I found myself working in the SEO industry. I still have a strong background in graphic design, and find myself utilizing those skills somewhat regularly, but my true “honed” skills are in the search realm.
I take pride in my work and my ability to achieve results.
These days, I’m all about running, and I spend as much time on my local Bay Area trails as possible. I like to write about these adventures from time to time.
I’m always looking for a challenge, both in the workplace and the outdoors. If you have a project that you think I might be interested in, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me!
