SEO makes Newsweek

[Brian Turner]

Seattle SEO Rand Fishkin makes Newsweek this week:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10415455/site/newsweek/

Three years ago, the web site of Oppedisano's Bootery, an 81-year-old shoe store in the amiable upstate village of Honeoye Falls, N.Y., was receiving a scant 100 visitors a week.

Then the owners hired a Seattle consultant named Rand Fishkin, who performed an obscure procedure called a "search-engine optimization." Fishkin built a new, easy-to-use Web store at a new address, shoe-store.net, and rewrote the shoe descriptions so that they were clearly visible to the Web's major search engines, which scour the Internet and index its content.

Since the search engines measure links as an indication of popularity, Fishkin also peppered online bulletin boards and shoe-enthusiast Web sites with links to his client's site.

It worked. Today, when someone searches online for Santana Helen boots or Dansko Montego loafers, the site comes out ahead of thousands of other shoe stores on the Web.

He also bought a ton of links for his client from me - so I guess you could say I've indirectly made Newsweek.