John Carcutt Bio and Social Media Roundup

John Carcutt

Founder/President of Applied SEO Inc.

John was a stereotypical “military brat”. His family moved frequently while growing up and he lived in a variety places from Alaska to London. He was able to settle in Southern Ohio for his high school years and went on to his formal education which included the study of photography at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and Computer Science at Wright State University. He served in the US Air Force Intelligence community as an Intelligence Analyst for 6 years which included tactical analysis during Desert Storm.

After his years in the Air Force, John was working as a Network Administrator and Advertising Coordinator for Cord Camera, a chain of 35+ Camera stores based out of Columbus Ohio. In 1995, this is where he pitched and subsequently built his first web site, the first fully enabled e-commerce site in the market. He later moved on to become the Product Development Manager for Lyford Digital, a power affiliate with over 30,000 web sites. This is where he began to fully embrace his passion for SEO. With John spearheading the optimization efforts the company’s income rose more than 40% in a little over a year to more than $150,000 a month based on organic traffic alone.

John then moved back to his original strength, online retail sales, as the Internet Marketing Manager for Voltexx, a manufacturer and distributor of ink jet cartridges online. In this very competitive market, John expanded his SEO knowledge and stepped into the worlds of PPC and other paid advertising online. Also at this time, John began to become very involved in the online SEO community as a whole. He started making a name for himself at a number of search engine marketing forums and communities online.

In early 2000, John took the position of Online Marketing Manager at Foreclosure Net, one of the top three National Foreclosure Data providers in the country. While managing all aspects of this company’s online marketing, John was able to employ his specific expertise in SEO and grow the already large volume of organic traffic over 300% in just 2 years. 100% of the company’s top 200 keywords had first page positions on Google with over 90 #1 positions. At the same time, Johns involvement in the SEO community online increased as well. He was invited to become a moderator at one of the best known SEO forums and his reputation as an SEO expert and a pure “White Hat” began to grow. He started his own blog, wrote of other SEO publications such as SearchEngineJournal and WebProNews and started speaking on the search trade show circuit, most notably the top search engine convention series Search Engine Strategies.

One of the high points of John career was being recruited to become the Director of Natural Search for MoreVisibility Inc. one of the nations leading search marketing firms and a 2 time Inc500 winner. During Johns tenure as an executive at this award winning firm, he rebuilt the organic search department, added numerous new deliverables and created one of the industries best site optimization review products. During his time at MoreVisibility John had direct hands on responsibility for optimizing the webs sites of and online marketing strategies for of some of the most recognizable brands in the country including, Stanley Tools, Cotton Inc, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Miami Herald, JC Penneys and The DMA itself.

The previous 12 years of experience have all contributed to the depth of Johns expertise in the field of SEO. To keep up with the ever-changing landscape of the SEO industry takes time and determination. John is now an independent consultant who only takes on projects which interest him and provide the most opportunity for growth or discovery. He is currently focusing on the many different ways Social Media can work in conjunction with SEO and general online marketing to improve the overall marketing efforts of businesses online.

John Carcutt
At the Recent WebPro100 SEO Panel in Boca Raton