I was hired to optimize Monster’s (cables not jobs) website more than a decade ago—before SEO was cool. All the popular SEO services and software you know (and hopefully use) today were all in their relative infancy, so keyword research was something of its own unique challenge, even then. Monster hired me because I was a writer, not because I knew jack about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Then again, not many people did back then. It was the Wild West of SEO, and the work felt largely like an experiment. I learned a lot, including such tedious items as what a canonical tag is and why you should use dashes instead of underscores in a URL. I ‘had words’ (and not of the keyword variety) with webmasters, tenaciously hanging onto every little SEO trick in the book for dear life, the success or demise of the company hanging in the balance.

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