Emory Rowland

I am Emory Rowland and this is my blog for interacting with people and technology. My interests are broad, but I’ve chosen to focus this blog on my passion for search engine optimization aka SEO. My job is SEO manager at a search engine marketing firm in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. I am fortunate enough to have the opportunity to help develop SEO strategies for some really outstanding companies. Much of what I have learned about optimizing websites has come from tweaking and experimenting done in my spare time, learning from friends and reading SEO forums and blogs.

My interest in SEO began to develop after poking around in the server log files and observing the traffic that certain pages were receiving. One of my great loves has been expressing myself through writing. I wrote fiction, poetry, PC gaming reviews, political opinion and my Christian testimony. After designing the original Clickfire site, I had fun creating graphics and posting them for visitors to download for free. While my creatitivity was flourishing on the Internet, these two questions began to motivate my curiosity and continue to drive my exploration into SEO today:

• Why did some of the pages receive more traffic from search engines than others?
• How could I make the pages receive more traffic?

I learned that one of the early methods for SEO was to add meta tags to Web pages with the desired keywords and so, I wrote a meta tag maker software program called “Metty” to take care of this task. Of course, search engine optimization is not so easy today. The updated online version, an XHTML meta tag generator is still live and believe it or not, still has some uses today.

SEO is fun. I enjoy competing with others and helping businesses and friends improve their search engine performance. I like the fact that the search industry often changes course and leads us in new directions.

As SEO evolved through the years and became more mainstream, I learned to adapt my optimization strategies to include link building, viral/link baiting and social media optimization aka SMO. The SEO philosophy I developed through the years has been a valuable life-enriching asset. I am still learning and plan to share as I go along. I have profiles on many social media sites but enjoy being active on these the most now:

Contact Me

emory
at
clickfire
dot
com