About SEO Dude

My name is Eric and I'm the one who owns and operates SEO Dude. My family and I live in the Monterey area of California.

I started doing SEO way back in 2001. I had just graduated from Stanford and started working at a small business my dad owned. It was a mail order auto parts business. I wasn't a car guy at all, but I loved numbers and business and I wanted to figure out how we could get our website to show up in Google searches.

At first I focused just on keywords. Then I realized there was much more to successful SEO and I became thirsty to learn more. I went to an SEO conference in Phoenix. I even remember buying an SEO training guide called "Stomp the Search Engines" (which appears to be long gone at this point but which was a building block for my understanding of SEO).

And then in 2004, I had an "aha" moment. Up until then I had been trying to get the homepage to be the page that showed up in search engines. And then a light bulb went off that I could have a variety of landing pages, each optimized for SEO performance. I had a yellow pad with a drawing on it of how the structure would look, and I wrote on it, "This might really be possible!"

And from that point on, my world changed. I re-organized the website architecture and went on a rampage to achieve SEO success. I was convinced that I had a home run idea, and I was betting my time and money that I was right. And it turned out that indeed I was right.

I spent almost a decade feeding time and effort into that home run SEO strategy. It was a fun and rewarding journey.

At this point, I no longer actively do SEO for that website. And yet the website keeps generating sales. It's generated more than $10 million of sales from free, organic search engine traffic just in the time since I stopped doing active SEO work.

One of things I enjoy most about SEO is that there are quantifiable metrics that can help you see your progress. I'm a math guy, so I love stuff like that. I'm not just talking about quantifying the sales that result from your SEO effort, but also about measuring the value of each SEO action that gets taken.

In particular, with SEO there is a benefit to getting publicity for your website. Each time you get publicity there are ways to measure the value of that piece of publicity. I love quantifying that.

So that's the SEO journey I've been on. But on a more personal level, one more thing about me that might help you understand me better: I often suffer from panic attacks!

It only started happening in adulthood. When a panic attack hits me, there is this sense that I'm in serious danger for some reason. It can be a terrifying experience. It also made me feel really isolated and like other people might not accept me.

I'm actually thankful for the panic though! The reason is because those panic attacks led me to mindfulness. I explored mindfulness as a way to help me tolerate the panic and to give it the room to express itself without me trying to fight it. It's been a long journey, but mindfulness has made a tremendous impact on my ability to live with the panic.

And lucky for me, it's done a lot more than just that. It's opened up my eyes to just how much love and connection there is right in front of me. Almost everyone suffers in some way, and I realize now that we can all support and accept each other instead of living in fear of each other's judgment!

I'm overflowing with gratitude these days, and I'm lucky enough to see that for me, inner peace is more valuable than financial success and it's available at my fingertips at literally any moment in time.

I hope you enjoy the website.