:: At work

     After some experience in the commercial sector in my youth, and then later in the professional training sector, which enabled me to work within some major European companies, in the mid 80s I started to concentrate on communication and marketing. At that time, nobody had yet even heard the Internet, and I worked as a consultant for numerous companies for a decade or so, defining marketing and communication strategies, organising events, product and service launches and thereby gaining a wealth of experience in many diverse sectors.

     In the first half of the 90s I developed an interest in the growth of the Internet, sensing like many others that this emerging media would have been the future of communication. Looking back today at the birth of the first website classification systems (Yahoo!, Lycos, then Altavista, Excite, HotBot…) it seems centuries ago, whilst in fact we're talking of 1994-95, just 8-9 years ago. In those days Italian businesses did not yet have any idea of the web's infinite possibilities, and “website positioning” just meant writing pages containing the desired keywords, submitting to the few existing search engines, waiting a couple of days and then seeing the results.

     In 1998, by which time the term SEO was beginning to mean something in Italy too, I and some friends formed a small company offering Web design, Internet marketing and search engine positioning services. Two years later we sold the company to a business in the IT sector, which transformed it into its own Internet division.

     In the meantime, I had become an editor in the Open Directory Project , supporting what was in 1999 still a semi-unknown initiative but which right from the start fascinated me as a system for organising and classifying the contents of the Web, where I was able to take personal part in the discussion and development of the system's own ontological structure, becoming a Meta Editor in 2001.

Back working as a consultant, I continued my involvement in SEO matters, participating among other things as a speaker in numerous seminars and training courses, contributing towards newsletters, ezines, ebooks and informative online articles, and acting as moderator or senior member in forums dedicated to Web marketing and SEM/SEO.

     From mid 2001 I also got involved in a parallel niche sector with enormous potential, which will grow still further in the future: Web site translation and internationalization . Demand for “SEO-compliant” translation and localization services, namely transferring site contents into different languages with an eye on search engine positioning, has in fact grown and continues to grow exponentially, and today 90% of my work is subcontracted from other SEO agencies who want to guarantee their own clients good visibility in different geo-linguistic areas. In practice, companies which until recently could have been my “competitors” (even if I have always seen the SEO sector as an arena in which collaboration is more important than “competition”) are today companies to whom I provide website translation and localization services, and Web globalization consultancy.

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