Mr. Hoerntlein found the internet in the late 1980’s. It was very rudimentary back then. The internet didn’t have any graphic images, no video, only alphanumeric characters.
Even so, Rob was in shock and awe, moving from information from a University in Montana, to a University in Eastern Canada.
As he began surfing the internet, back then there wasn’t any World Wide Web. It was Archie, Veronica, finger, gopher and other page groupings. The World Wide Web brought all of that together into one platform that could all be seen using a single browser.
Rob realized that he was wasting time just surfing and learning more than he thought he ever could. So, he went to school and learned how to design websites and webpages. There were very few people who could do this.
He realized that he could group the websites in many different configurations. He could create a group for a single small city or town. He could group them by type of business, he even created a group for businesses who had their sites built by himself. Another popular grouping was various Business groups, such as the Chamber of Commerce. He realized that by doing these groupings he could get more traffic to the sites he built. That made him more popular. The person who could create more traffic, had more customers, could use that in marketing and generate even more customers. That was the first time Rob began thinking about effective SEO, even though it was not named that yet. This was maybe 1993.
One of his first SEO successes was when he created a website for a local Radio Shack store. I know that more than half of you who are reading this have never heard of Radio Shack. It was a kind of specialty hardware store. They sold more technology items. Speakers, various batteries, many different wires and adapters, etc.
Through creating pages (content marketing, article marketing), naming them more effectively (SEO), writing text behind images when we figured out how to include them on a webpage. He was able to rank higher than the corporate site.
They were furious and changed their franchise agreement that no one was to use SEO or other practices to rank a site above theirs. The one I created was the only one to rank above theirs.
Rob never used black hat techniques. That would be keyword stuffing, writing for the search engines instead of real people and much more. He only wrote white hat techniques so his clients never suffered any of the drastic changes the search engines made to keep the focus on the user.
Rob has continued to educate himself to stay ahead of others in using SEO to keep Your site ahead of your competitors.
Rob Was in Shock and Awe
