About

The Ross Hudgens Story

When I was young, I was a pretty introverted kid. I grew up slightly chubby and wearing glasses, and the time I grew up in was around the advent of the internet. I had a television and a dreamer mentality at the same time, so I found myself enthralled in wrestling. Not grecco-roman or freestyle wrestling – professional wrestling. I spent much of my days looking forward to WCW or WWF (now WWE), looking up how I would become a wrestler, and actively doing whatever I could to project myself into that world.

This involved two things: one, creating fake wrestling matches on trampolines and in the yards with my friends, and two, looking towards the internet. Somehow, I came across a second way to fake-transport myself into the world of professional wrestling. Since I had access to the internet, I somehow come across leagues where you could roleplay a professional wrestler. Whatever your mind could believe, it could achieve. You could be a 7’8′ athletic genius, or a 3 foot behemoth of the ring. Size, here, mattered little – and it was not the physical characteristics you could dream up for your characters that would get you a victory or a World Championship. Here, it was the best writer who won the day. This kind of wrestling – as nerdy as it is – can aptly be described as e-wrestling.

These leagues were – and are – based on writing. You would write promos for your character who would “spar” against the other, and whoever wrote the best promos each week – as decided by the league manager, would win the match. Most people who participated were in their late teens or early 20s – and me, as a ambitious early teen, took abrasive measures to even compete against more developed minds. My time was frequently spent diving into Dictionary.com, threading through Thesauruses, and subscribing to word of the day lists – which meant that my vocabulary developed at a rate unlike most other people – ever. Most of this time was spent not really knowing any of these words, but rather, faking like I did, and somewhere along the line, I managed to pick up a lot of them.

This technique – and this rare circumstance – is what led me to the unique writing style I have today. I’ve frequently been told – after people have talked to me and both read my writing – that they are amazed at the difference between what I say and what I write. This is because I spent my whole childhood articulating this on the internet, without having a need to say it out loud. I know it, but I don’t express it vocally – because it was never a need, at least not until intelligence mattered – vocally – some six to ten odd years later.

High School and Into College

At some point, thankfully, I managed to (partially) outgrow my extremely introverted childhood. I got contact lenses and I grew into a 6’3 frame – which meant that I went to play on football. I played through college at Chapman University in Southern California, and for the most part, that became an extreme focus of all I did. Near the end of my time playing, I started to realize that from the very start, my football career had a ceiling – and it had paralyzed a real part of my life, at least as it came to my career. I was never going to play in the NFL, and for that reason, my intense focus on it from freshman year of high school to around my junior year of college (when I started realizing this fact), meant that I had wasted a lot of my time invested in it – at least as it come to self-actualization and achieving ultimate goals.

Thankfully, I had still attended a good school and had the base to make it up. During college, I was given the partial task of marketing the website at my part time job, JANIX. My boss, Janice Sidorick, was great about helping me develop my skills and learn, so I took to the internet, and stumbled upon this thing, SEO. I found SEMPO (which I have yet to return to), and assorted other things and did my worst to implement them on the site. I had absolutely no clue what I was doing, and the current state of the site reflects that. However, this brief introduction to SEO would setup my entire career path in the space.

The SEO Career Begins

I went on to take an unpaid internship, which I quickly left for a part time position with SingleGrain. I was Sujan Patel’s first employee with the company. Sujan is best known as the cousin of Neil Patel, which he laments, but he is a great person, businessman and mentor in his own right – and has helped develop and push me my entire career. We started working from his small apartment in Orange, California, but quickly grew the company from a small base of three clients to a height of 20. Sujan headed up business development as I built up our SEO processes, managed employees, and took care of main link building tasks for our clients.

Sujan quickly moved to San Francisco to grow the company. The pull of Silicon Valley – and the ability to push forward my career as quickly as possible – was irresistible, so I quickly joined him there, now having graduated. We now had an office and a vision – things at Single Grain were extremely exciting, to say the least.

However, a certain junction point occurred where I was beginning to outgrow the growth path of Singlegrain. Things were going well, but so was my growth – almost exponentially. When my next company, MediaBoost, came calling, I had a hard time not listening. They had my first SEO Manager job in wait, and another exciting opportunity to help build out a developing company.

Welcome to Washington

I helped manage a few of their properties and help build out things from scratch – and things went well. However, seven or so months into the process, I got a call from Blue Moon Ventures in Bellevue, Washington. Amped by their impressive reputation and my own lofty career goals – I couldn’t possibly refuse. And as such, my SEO career has me currently living in Seattle, Washington – blogging about an industry, SEO, I love – and also spending much of my waking hours otherwise dedicated to it.

This blog is about all I do and think about in SEO, and occasionally, elsewhere. My non-SEO blog ramblings are on Posterous, although I blog there less often. I say the most on Twitter – but I can be found elsewhere, too. Thanks for reading! If you have any comments or questions about SEO, please contact me – I won’t bite.

Locate Me On The Web

Twitter | Posterous | Search Engine Land | Hacker News | SEOMoz | Search Engine Journal | LinkedIn | Vimeo