Danny Sullivan: SEO Pioneer
If you’re in the SEO business and you don’t yet know who Danny Sullivan is, then you’re either a complete newbie or living in some kind of fantasy world. Danny Sullivan is, for all intensive purposes, the godfather of search engine optimization, having been in the business long before SEO became mainstream.
In 1995, after having helped a friend get his website “seen” by the search engines, Danny took the knowledge that he gained and began further investigating how search engines worked. The results of his studies were published online as “A Webmaster’s Guide to Search Engines”. The results received such a positive reaction that Danny decided to expand on the guide and create an entire website dedicated to the topic. Thus was the birth of Search Engine Watch in 1996.
In his years at SEW, Danny saw a great deal of success, having been featured in reknowned publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, New York Times, and others. In the late 1990’s, Sullivan sold Search Engine Watch to MecklerMedia (now Jupiter Media) for an undisclosed sum. He stayed on with SEW as editor-in-chief until 2006. SEW watch was recently sold by JupiterMedia to Incisive Media for $43 million dollars.
Not only did the website achieve a great amount of success, but Search Engine Watch also began conducting a series of trade shows dubbed “Search Engine Strategies”, or SES for short. Thousands of SEO & SEM professionals, executives, and other top businessmen attend the trade shows each year, paying upwards of $2,000 to attend. The conference has also gained major corporate sponsorships and exhibitions, which start at about $5,000.
Danny Sullivan left Search Engine Watch in late 2006, and at the SES Chicago show rumors of his plans for the future began to emerge. Danny wasn’t getting out of the business altogether, he was just going to start up a new site and business by the name of Search Engine Land.
Search Engine Land has been for only a short period of time, but because of Danny’s reputation as a search leader, it has already gained a huge following. Search Engine Land is also set to have their first conference this summer - Search Marketing Expo - in Seattle, WA on June 4-5. For Danny Sullivan, the future looks very bright.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
