Brett Tabke – SEO Pioneers
Brett Tabke – SEO Pioneer
In 1982, Brett spent his last $400 on a Commodore 64 as he was leaving for university. He bought a modem and logged onto the university system and it blew him away.
He spent time on early Bulletin Boards and started talking to people online.
In 1985, he wrote a paper about ‘the web’ and knew the internet was going to be his career.
After writing programmes, including a flight monitoring system for Aspen airport, Brett moved into websites.
He started out creating a website for an agricultural farm dealer and after that was asked by 100 dealers to create sites for them too.
Off the back of this, he built the Howdy Ag search engine to index all the agriculture sites.
He was also getting asked about SEO and online marketing so he built a forum to manage all the questions.
The forum took off and in 1998, he moved it to a new domain as Webmaster World.
The very first PubCon happened in London at the City of York as a ‘conference in a pub’. Founded as a group meeting from Webmaster World moderators, Brett wasn’t at the first one.
Brett stepped in to make PubCon a professional conference after his years of experience organising conferences in the ’80s.
In this episode, Brett talks about:
- How he created an early packet-run internet to talk to groups of people across the US
- How he ended up creating farm dealer websites and then built an agricultural search engine
- How he managed to build a thousand links from university sites in the late 90s
- How he figured out the AltaVista algorithm and could rank any keyword
- What he thought of early Google
- Why he shut his link farm down
- Who was his favourite keynote at PubCon and who was the most expensive speaker
- The outstanding controversial moments at PubCon
- How PubCon has evolved
- And where PubCon might go next
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