Duane Forrester is best known as the industry-facing representative for Bing when he helped to launch Bing Webmaster tools in 2011. Duane was awarded the search personality of the year in 2014 and is a well-known personality in the SEO industry but Duane actually started out working for Ceasers Palace in the mid 90s before working for an online sport betting company.
The most interesting part of this interview was the talking about Duane's time at Microsoft and his interaction with the search engine team. From this time, Duane learned a lot about how search engines work and he realised that SEOs were not that far off the mark.
In this interview, Duane talks about:
00:10:15 Duane's introduction to computers
00:14:00 Attending and speaking for the first time at SES New York that started his speaking career-
00:17:12 How conferences have been the space to connect with others who understood what being an SEO is and where he built a network of friends
00:18:40 What his first speech topic was - fundamental things you have to get right
00:22:00 Inexperienced people entering the industry and job hopping because they reach the limit of their knowledge
00:23:20 Why foundational knowledge is so important and testing really matters
00:26:30 SEO experimentation in the early days
00:38:00 Being invited to apply to work at Microsoft
00:44:10 Starting work at MSN
00:45:02 Being shown how the search engine worked
00:46:40 Being a representative at search conferences for Microsoft
00:47:57 How there is no one single factor for ranking and it's all cumulative
00:49:00 How search engines are internally compartmentalized
00:51:46 The shock of the insights that he learned from Microsoft engineers
00:53:43 How it's all incremental and goes back to the foundational
00:57:00 How SEO is starting to look in the wrong direction
01:01:10 SEOs would benefit from learning more about marketing
01:02:30 The mistake companies make in siloing SEO where it should be integrated
01:06:26 What Duane misses the most about the early days
Read more here: shelleywalsh.com/pioneers/duane-forrester
10 окт 2024
