I have been in the computer industry for as long as I can remember. Right out of the Navy I got a job as a mainframe computer technician (in June of 1977) and saw my first PC in the early 80’s. I remember playing with it for a couple of weeks and ended up declaring that it’d never catch on. Well, that’s not the only time I’ve been wrong… trust me.

By 1989 I not only was using PCs every day of my life, I sold a few also. They made much more sense once Windows came out. That allowed the average idiot the ability to use it as intended (still no internet as far as I was concerned but in those days the net was only for learning; not so much for business).

It wasn’t until the mid-nineties that the company I worked for decided to investigate the possibility of getting online. I took the responsibility to heart and decided to learn everything I could about this new frontier.

Six months later I was an internet junkie (or so I thought). I built my first website and it was either uphill or downhill from there (I really don’t know which). It’s been the same story ever since.

Of course back then websites had hideous backgrounds and animated gifs all over the place. Today’s designers would get a laugh at what we thought was “state of art”. However, we need to remember that a good-sized hard drive at that time was all of 80 Meg – and we couldn’t fill THAT up! Plus, everyone was on dial-up; not 56k but closer to 28k. ISDN (128k) looked like something from Star Wars. Could computers REALLY go that fast? If someone placed a picture online you could go have lunch (and a nap) while it downloaded. And, when it displayed, it still looked like something from a coloring book.

I performed my first SEO job around 2001 for a local doctor. I created his site and optimized it to gain ranking. At the time, Altavista was one of the top search engines and once done his pages had every spot on the first two SERPs. He dominated most of the rest of the engines also so he was a happy guy. NOTE: So were we because we charged him just a little over $12,000 for the work.

It’s funny that, after all these years, the number of business men and women who still do not understand why they need to be found on the Internet. A large percentage of these people still feel that having a site is good enough – whether anyone knows about it or not. I just don’t get it.

However, that said, I think times are getting ready to change (again). As more people migrate from the phone book to finding local businesses online, these businesses will HAVE to change their attitude – or lose all of their customers to their competition.

The time is upon us… The transition to Local has started. Wake up, people. It’s your livelihood that you’re messing with!

Filed under: General

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