How did I end up in SEO?

Well , it all dates back to the 1980s when , as a kid , at age nine in 1985 , I got my first computer , which was Commodore 64 , for Christmas . After God , it must have been two , three years of badgering my parents that I wanted a computer . They finally gave in and , yeah , I got a Commodore 64 , and that old 8-bit computer was my start into computing .

I graduated onto a Commodore Amiga later , but back in those days , while I did try a little bit of programming , I was mainly just playing games . Like most kids my age , I think , we all persuaded our parents that getting us a computer would turn us into these new brilliant programmers . But other than some basic stuff , most of us just played games .

So heading off into my teens , yeah , I became a bit of a tear away . I didn't much like school . I did all right , I did well , but I didn't want to stay past 16 , because back then you could leave and just get a job back in the early 90s .

But I left and the summer after leaving my mum came and kicked me out of bed one afternoon probably because , being a teenager , I didn't get up early , and she said you've got to do something . So I went off to our local sixth form college and interviewed for a load of different courses .

They didn't offer a levels , which is what would have been the traditional thing to do , but they just did these things called BTECs , which still exist , although they might have a different name now which are more , I suppose , vocational based , and they were like single subjects .

So I did an interview for engineering and an interview for computer studies and , to be honest , I just like the guy who interviewed me for computer studies the best . His name was Guy Frost . I don't know what he's up to nowadays , he's probably quite old now and yeah . So I decided to do his course and that's why I really actually learnt to programme .

I actually really enjoyed my two years there . It was a nice relaxed atmosphere . We just did everything computing . I learnt turbo Pascal and cobalt , two languages Most people probably never heard of . Turbo Pascal , cobal was very big in the 1960s and 70s .

So , yeah , after doing two years there , I completed the course , got a good grade , got accepted into Newcastle University to do a computer science degree , which I went to primarily because it was a long way from home and I wanted to get as far away from home as possible , which is ironic given that I now live only about four or five miles away from where I

grew up . So but yeah , that was my main motivation back then was to get as far away as possible . And yeah , that's where I got my first real taste of the internet . I remember first the first one of the first induction lessons lectures we had there . They introduced us to the World Wide Web which I don't think I'd ever seen before . Then .

I think I'd heard of it , read of it , but in magazines back then , because obviously we didn't read on the internet , we just had magazines . And yeah , so the World Wide Web and it was the Mosaic browser , if I remember right . I remember thinking , yeah , this looks pretty cool .

And yeah , that's where I got my first basic introduction to the internet , creating web pages and doing some pretty cool stuff which , yeah , you don't even get to do at university and it was kind of a bit of a brave new world then , but it wasn't really that commercialized back then . But that's where I first got into it .

I spent a lot of time on internet relay chat , which is ILC , one of the first sort of online chat applications . That's when I got my first modem on my PC , which we were very unusual obviously my student house , because I was a computer science student . We could access the internet by dialing into the university .

So I got a modem and , yeah , we could actually access the internet from home , which was very unusual back in sort of 1994 , 1995 time . But yeah , no , we did . I spent a lot of time there but it was mainly just mocking about .

So after graduating I got a job at the University of Derby working on their student record system , which was , to be fair , quite dull , but you know it was a good first job and after that , so we'll come back to you .

So I was working on the student record system but in my spare time I was playing around with web stuff , trying to create database driven websites , and I actually got playing about with linking the student record system to web pages so that we could display .

So we could display student records directly through a web browser so that students could see their own information , update their own information , which was quite novel back at the time . We're talking around about 2000, .

1999 , 2000 now and at the end I ended up leading a team who built what was called UDU , university of Derby Online , which was one of the first systems that we knew of where students could actually a university could actually access and manage their own information online via the web , which obviously saved a huge amount of administration time at the university .

So that was really cool . Now , long back this time , I've been oh yeah , I've been working at Derby . Unifer must have been I think it was five years at the time .

Now , while I had a great time , I'd realized that there were lots of other people who worked with , lots of colleagues who'd been there for quite a long time , and these people I started to refer to as lifers .

I could see that they were only ever gonna work there and they weren't going anywhere , and I decided I was only in my early twenties and I didn't want to spend the rest of my life working there . No disrespect to anyone that did . If that's your choice , that's your choice , but I wanted to do a little more .

So that's when I ended up getting a job a digital agency in , yeah , the early 2000s and my role there was the head of development .

So the idea being , as I looked after all the developers in the agency and worked on pictures and things like that , and they had some great clients , how I sold names like BAFTA , cineworld Cinemas , interflora , tesco , large number of airlines , all sorts it was a really complete change from working in the university sector .

But at this time , more and more of their clients who originally just created I think in many cases they created websites without any real reason .

They were just because it was the thing to do A lot of them started asking about search engine optimization , seo , and I remember one of the directors coming to me and saying right , ed , you're now the SEO expert , and that meant I had to learn what on earth that meant and how to actually start improving .

So that's really when I got into SEO , because I was just told you've got to get into SEO . So now I've been tasked with becoming the SEO expert . Where do I start ? Well , I looked around and found a fantastic forum called SEOchatcom , which was a online forum which was a great resource . It had hugely active members at the time .

You could get advice and answers around the clock , and some of the names that were on that at the time you'll recognize now if you get into SEO people like Ron Fishkin , who founded SEO Moz , barry Schwartz , who was known as Rusty Brick and who founded Search Engine Roundtable , and Marie Haynes , who's now well known for helping people recover from Google Penalties .

My name on there was Channel 5 , which is why my Twitter handle is channel 5 . You see , people didn't really use real names so much back then . Marie was one of the rare ones to actually use her real name and , yeah , I used Channel 5 , which is a nickname I'd used online Prior to that .

It was when I first went on a chat forum , I think back in the AOL days around at a friend's house , and I had to choose a nickname and their address was 5 , the channel . So I just used the nickname Channel 5 , and I've used it ever since , for probably about I've had in towards 30 years now .

So , anyway , like , yeah , this forum was where I basically discovered everything SEO .

There were all shades of SEO in there , from black hat , gray hat , white hat but it was very friendly and welcoming domain , but suddenly it closed down in 2019 , but it had really been in decline for a long time before then , with platforms like Twitter and Facebook taking over from it . But that's where I got my grounding in SEO .

So , to be fair to SEO chat , yeah , that's where I took a lot of information , asked a lot of questions and that's what we put into practice with our clients at the digital agency and it really worked . We really got some fantastic results .

So I went from being no , nothing about SEO to being told I was the SEO expert , actually learning how to do SEO and implement it for clients . So that's the basic story of how I came from a child of the 80s with the eight bit computers , then onto PCs doing computer studies and computer science , getting into web stuff and then learning SEO .

But where did we go from there ? I'll cover in a future episode how I went from doing SEO for clients but then realizing there's a lot of power in here in being able to rank websites , want to do it for myself , build my own websites and my own business on from that . So that's what we'll cover in a few trips .

Now if you listen to this and say to yourself I want to get into SEO , but I don't have a technical background . I don't know how to program .

I don't have my stories completely different to this , don't worry , because you know that's just my story , and maybe 20 years ago it did help to have a technical background to get into SEO , but nowadays it's just not the case .

I think probably it's becoming more of a rarity to have an actual technical background to get into SEO nowadays and with platforms available nowadays like WordPress , shopify and others , which just weren't available back in those days , you had to literally write everything from scratch and create things from scratch . In many cases that's just not a problem anymore .

You can get set up no code , you can get a website going and you don't need to be technical at all . But to get your SEO right , yeah , anyone can do that if they know what to look for . That's what we'll cover over coming episodes . Thanks for listening , as always , I really appreciate it . Please subscribe and share . It really helps .

Seo is not that hard . It's brought to you by KeywordsPeopleUsecom , the solution to finding the questions people ask online . See why thousands of people use this every day . Try it today for free at KeywordsPeopleUsecom . If you want to get in touch or have any questions , I'd love to hear from you .

I'm at Channel Five on Twitter where you can email me at podcast at KeywordsPeopleUsecom . Bye for now . See you in the next episode of SEO . It's not that hard .