How does one segue from subsistence farming in the rain forest to harvesting hits on the World Wide Web?

"It wasn't a plan," says search engine specialist William Johnson, of Tucson, Arizona. "In mid-1994, I got bored watching a pre-season University of Arizona football game and wandered to the main library's deserted computer lab. I'd spent my last 20 years in the jungle, and had never used a computer, but...

"I found Mosaic, the earliest version of Netscape, so intuitive that in a few clicks I discovered the Oxford Library site and the manuscript of my favorite poem, Keats' 1810, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." I finished reading the powerful work, then sat silent. My epiphany was such that I realized right then that this is what I would do for the rest of my life. I had found the rest of my life."

Johnson stared at his future, realizing he had a problem: he was computer illiterate. He sat quietly, his mind racing with possibilities. Suddenly he heard, "Hey, buddy! We fixin' t' close!" For years, he'd owned and operated a fruit farm, an ornamental export nursery, and a restaurant in Costa Rica. Now situated in the Sonoran Desert, Johnson stood up and set about changing his life. We pick up the story almost six years later.

Q. How much time elapsed from the start of your business until you brought in sufficient income to know this new career was going to work?
A. 24 months.

Q. Did you see yourself initially as a Web designer?
A. I have never billed myself as a Web designer, although in 1995 I designed several commercial Web sites still in use today. In late 1996 I realized that if I wanted to continue to work the Web I needed to specialize. In addition to the "find a need and fill it" maxim there is another less well-known guide to making money, "look for work that needs doing that no one else wants to do." Bingo! Almost no one wanted to do Search Engine Positioning and it needed doing. I began intensive study in this area.

Q. What areas of Web development must you as a specialist know and study regularly in order to help clients bring visitors to their site?
A. It's important to know every aspect of Web development, and to be competent in most of these areas.

Q. Do most potential clients understand the scope of knowledge required of a professional in this field?
A. None do, so far as I know, but then most lay persons underestimate the scope of knowledge required of a professional in any field.

Q. Do many Web business owners understand the need for professional SE positioning?
A. The awareness of the need seems to come in waves - several months of no activity, then I get deluged with inquiries, and then an ebb followed by another wave and then another ebb. However, in the first quarter of this new millennium, I see a general awareness that visitors do not come to a Web site by accident.

Some activity is required to bring visitors to sites and that activity is going to cost something. I also see an increasing awareness that there is a cost / visitor relationship and that the lowest cost / visitor percentage is achieved by using a SE specialist.

Q. What site/business problems propel people to come to you for SE help?
A. Lack of sales. Lack of phone calls. They look on a search engine for their goods or services and discover that their sites aren't listed in the first 55,000 matches - even when they search for their company names.

Q. How much of your new business comes from referrals?
A. As much as 90%.

Q. Have any of your clients asked you to do more than just SE placement, simply because they like your work and they trust you? If so, how much will you do?
A. Almost all ask for more. Trust is so valued on the Web - more than on the street. I do hosting and some Web site re-design, which are the most common requests, and help some clients set up an effective newsletter. I hire out graphic design and CGI programming.

My favorite activity is helping clients with the interpretation of their Web site statistics so they understand user behavior on their sites and learn exactly where their visitors come from. This helps them calculate the real value of their advertising efforts and pinpoints weak spots in their site navigation.

Q. Who are your Web heroes?
A. I listen to every word Jakob Nielsen writes. I highly recommend his classic September 1997 article, Why Advertising Doesn't Work on the Web. By publishing this article Nielsen became the first to utter this heretical phrase in public. I also respect Jared Spool.

Q. As the Web grows exponentially, can serious Web business owners afford the time to personally handle their SE positioning? When they approach you, what options do you offer?
A. Because people want different levels of involvement and are willing to pay different levels of fees, I have four different packages on my site.

Q. In 1998 you declared that GoTo.com was a loser. In 1999 you acknowledged that it's a winner. Now, another year has passed. Ready to comment on GoTo and its effect on the industry?
A.When GoTo.com launched January '98 I predicted they would never get enough visitors to make it worth Web site owners' time to bother bidding on keywords there. I reasoned that we already have too many SEs. The fact is that GoTo.com was another great idea from Bill Gross. That is partly why he is a billionaire and I am slogging along as a foot soldier in the Search Engine Wars. :-)

GoTo.com right now is too cool to be real. My prescience has already been discredited, but I predict that by Jan 2001 most keywords on GoTo.com will be bid up too high for the small business owner. When the bids get up toward $1.00 / clickthru then it is hardly better than targeted banner ads.

Q. What are the current effective (in terms of driving traffic) SE's that Web developers should target?
A. There are about 20 SE's and Directories that account for 99.9% of all searches. Then there are 8000 so-called SE's that account for not much more than getting you on yet another junk email list. I mean, if you have heart murmurs and you are looking for information about your condition, are you going to look at Big Bubba's Barrel o' Links Dot Com or Northern Light? I list the worthwhile SE's under Item 11 on http://netprofitnow.com/essential-detail.html.

Q. If you were lecturing to a class of bright, computer-literate people who wanted to become Web developers, would you recommend specialization or generalization?
A. In a choice between generalization and specialization, the latter makes more sense to me - find a niche in the Internet ecology. Find one thing you do well and do it a lot.

Sometimes I think back to that event at the University of Arizona and realize that I could have just kicked back and watched the football game and maybe missed out on the rest of my life.