Elizabeth Doherty Thomas SEO Story

I am a liberal arts major who worked as a human resources analyst and in various corporate functions. All the while I kept my dad updated on "my generation" and the internet which is my "native language". Baby boomers are almost by definition immigrants to the world wide web and there are still a decent number of Gen Xer's, particularly women, who might as well be immigrants for their lack of web experience or confidence.

When I had my first baby in 2005 I chose to be a stay at home mom and work for a new therapy website that my father and a colleague started. I learned a ton but it wasn't until launching another venture, The First Dance, a wedding planning meets premarital counseling website, that things really got moving.

From frustration or ignorance we learn

They say to throw money into advertising and "see what sticks." After spending thousands of dollars and not getting very far I knew it was time to take things into my own hands. I was tired of spending money and not seeing the results on The First Dance. (The therapy website was established with much media flurry so it was holding its own for a while. We put a lot of money into paid Google and Yahoo ads which we believed was the only way we would draw the web traffic. Now I groan realizing how much money we wasted both in the raw dollars but also the ignorance in how we set up our paid ads.)

What is this "Search engine optimization" stuff doing to help me?

I happened to be looking up the owner of a website using a web tool known as "whoisdomaintools.com" when I noticed a "SEO" ranking score. Long story short it peaked my interest as I made a few small changes to my own website and saw my little "SEO score" improve. I knew things couldn't be that easy so off I went to Google "SEO".

I'm close enough to the Baby Boomer generation to think books speak the truth in a way the internet may not, so I absorbed a couple books on "SEO" and was pretty horrified at how my websites were set up once I knew what to look for. My webmaster, to his credit, never claimed to be an SEO expert... boy was he right! My customer was engaged couples and that ENTIRE PAGE talking directly to them wasn't even in Googles directory.

So I unwittingly started what turned into an extremely time consuming, fascinating, thrilling, annoying, long couple months. Up at 6am with the newborn, work at my childrens naps, work from 7pm to 2am. I became obsessed. I ran around the house screaming "The robots came, the robots came!" But I can tell you the results are amazing and the satisfacation that comes with it is very rewarding! Dare I say it's almost a spiritual thing to put something on this amazing world wide web that you believe in your heart is truly helpful to people and the people find you among the billions of websites out there.

I no longer feel a need to throw marketing money at typical "ads" and where we do spend money is more for networking and spreading our message through people - not ads. I can even say I rank as high or higher than a 68 million dollar website for the area of my speciality (premarital counseling.) For $120 a MONTH they gave me 10 visitors a month to my average of over 100 visitors a DAY today. Go little old stay at home mom, me!

There is so much out there on search engine optimization. Some of it is way above my head technically, some of it just makes no sense, some of it reeks of "slick sales", some of it is a total scam. But even up against multimillion dollar companies I feel I can hold my own with the knowledge that this work is ultimately

an art, not a science, and success is defined in YOUR terms, nobody elses.

I just want to show you a small example of how this year has grown for one of my sites, The First Dance. I've been averaging a 30% growth rate every month and I am far from "done" with optimizing my site. It's truly an ongoing project just like your own professional continuing education. But my husband is finishing graduate school to be a marriage and family counselor and we need to pay the bills with what will be a 60% pay cut from his former life in IT. Marry for love and you have to work for the money. I might as well as help as many others as I can in the process.

  January 2007 July 2008
# of Keyphrases (what people typed in a search toolbar and resulted in a click to my website) 37 2000
Average daily visitors 12 200