The SEO Battlefield

Foreword

Technology and visions of the future have always beguiled me, even in my earliest memories. My first computer was a Commodore 64 that I shared with my brother at around age five or six. Throughout my childhood, computers were ever-present—my dad always made sure of that. My parents encouraged me to pursue whatever interested me throughout my life, so I did. Sometimes my interests seemed a bit odd to others. At age seven, I wanted to reinvent the diaper to be ecofriendly and made of leaves. This was probably inspired by Gilligan’s Island reruns. At age nine, I disassembled and reassembled my clock radio to see how it worked. In junior high school, I sewed a watch onto a T-shirt for my science fair project invention. The project was not well received. I was told nobody would ever want to wear a gadget.

I constantly tinkered with every piece of technology I could get my hands on, trying to learn more. My fascination with the “interwebs” started the moment that sweet, sweet 28.8 Cardinal modem came into my life. I discovered Compuserve and AOL search, then chat rooms. Fondly I remember visiting the undergraduate library at University of Texas and cruising the web. Lycos, Alta Vista, Excite, Yahoo!, and Geocities were my bridge to another planet. Information became rapidly available like never before and my fascination with the virtual world bloomed.

After high school, I attended the University of Texas at Austin during the first dot-com boom in the late 1990s. It was a truly ...