The short version of a guy who went from being a linguist to a localiser to a webmaster to a database designer to a web marketeer to a CMS designer to an SEO with marketing skills.
I’m a linguist that started localising mauals and software in 1991. I worked mainly with localising for Apple. First with a company named Jess, and after my first child was born (1993) and after a year of just admiring my beautiful dauthter and pretending to be a theater producer, with Tanto Datainformation (now LocalEyes Sweden).
I found the this thing called the web one day in the mid nineties and really liked it. In 1997 I bought my own domain (lindqvist.com). In order to put stuff on my domain I developed a simple CMS.
Right away, I sold the CMS to Apple Computer Sweden, and shortly after was hired as a contract webmaster for www.apple.se. That was really fun! I knew next to nothing about being a webmaster, but who did in those days? So I pretended to know what I was doing, while teaching myself html, kept developing my CMS, learned a lot about web marketing and got a new job. This time for the Swedish Advertising Association (Reklamförbundet). Shortly after Steve Jobs came back to Apple and all the local Apple domains moved to California. This was in the fall of 1998.
At Reklamförbundet, I worked with databases, and kept developing my CMS (now at work on reklam.se). It was fun, but actually not enough to keep me busy at all times.
Instead I started the first Swedish wine promotion site, Vinguiden.com, together with Magnus Bergquist. After a year I quit my position at Reklamförbundet and dedicated all time to Vinguiden.com and the new site Cocktailguiden.com, a site that now has more than 1,200 photografed drink recipes, indexed every way you can think of too. These two sites first ran on Mac servers, but after learning the hard way that Macs running FileMaker wheren’t really suited for popular sites (we had an advertising campaign that happened to end up on MSN early in 2001) I quickly had to learn PHP and MySQL and moved to Linux.
Now that really got my own CMS started, and for a couple of years I did lots of sites for clients. Every new site added features to KitSiPub (which really stands for Kitchen Sink Publishing). My clients where mostly small and medium sized companies and organisations, and all in all I think there has been about 100 KitSiPub sites out there. The clients loved KitSiPub because it was simple, very text centeric, and platform independent. Even better, Google turned out to really fall in love with KitSiPub sites!
At the time I didn’t really understand why Google loved sites that I made. It started with reklam.se, a site that I took from a frame based version with lots of graphic heading and text in images, to a pure and simple text based site. Over time I figured that the text based meny, the linked h-tagged heading, the title tags and the description text worked together, and formed the foundation that made Google really grasp what a page was all about. And that, pushed me into learning more about SEO.
Today, in 2007, I share my time between developing new features for Cocktailguiden.com (you’ll soon see them replicated on Drinkalizer.com), developing sites about areas that interest me, and consulting in the Swedish SEO business – mainly with education and as a speaker at marketing conferences. I’m also quite active as an SEO-black-hat hunter in the Swedish SEO community. You’ll find me on SEO-forum.se, on V7n.com and of course on WebmasterWorld. I’m also co-owner of Carnaby Solutions, a company that specialises on consulting about every kind of ”word of mouse” marketing, including, but not at all limited to search marketing.
My Swedish blog talks a lot about web marketing, and this blog will probably do that too, but I’m just as interested in the death of e-mail marketing (nobody under 20 uses mail anymore), website statistics, web driven guerilla marketing, affiliate marketing, new web techniques…
I promise to keep my family out of this blog. I have a separate one for those topics, and there won’t be any cat posts eihter. My dog, Chili, wouldn’t like it.