This is part of the say something nice about an SEO/SEM series - feel free to nominate someone over here.
Loren Baker is 43 years old, lives in Santa Clarita, California with his wife and 7 year old boy. He is a family man and a community man, from what I can tell from his Facebook profile. I've known Loren for a dozen plus years and he is a fun, smart and hard working man. He started one of the original search blogs around the same time I did, it is named Search Engine Journal and it produces mediocre (just messing) content around SEO and SEM content - and has been for years. Loren doesn't write as often as he once did there but he is still extremely active in the SEO space both in terms of managing content, writing content, speaking at conferences and being on social.
Loren has inspired a huge number of SEOs to be better at what they do, learn more, test more and be more in their profession. He also is genuinely a nice guy, who cares about his peers in the industry and would do anything to help a friend. He is very supportive of the industry as a whole and has really devoted much of his life to the industry. It is a tiring thing to do, but he is one of the very few in our space to have done so consistently throughout his professional career.
He is also super sarcastic, which I love and which you will read in his bio below.
Loren has helped shaped the SEO industry as we know it.
Anna Crowe nominated Loren and wrote:
Loren Baker is the Founder of SEJ and a great mentor to me. I've been working at SEJ for almost 2 years now and he's not only provided great inspiration, but motivation for me to stay in this industry. He hosts the SENerds podcast, runs webinars, and speaks internationally at conferences. Not to mention, he runs his own company in addition to running SEJ. As someone with only 5 years of experience in this industry, I've looked up to Loren since the beginning. He has showed me how to develop content marketing processes and strategies that *really* build links. I've taken his strategies I've learned from our weekly calls and implemented them in my real-life consulting work and it's taken off. Thank you, Loren! Keep up the awesome work!
Loren Baker Bio: Loren is the founder of Search Engine Journal, which he personally built as a personal blog (4 months before SERoundtable launched, while he was living in Brazil) which covered the SEO industry and now is one of the leading media publications around SEO and Search Marketing.
He also helps to run Foundation Digital, an award winning SEO and content marketing agency.
Favorite thing about the SEO community? To me, SEO is a balance of art and math, of creativity and analytical thinking. That's what attracted me to SEO and digital marketing early on and it's what gets me out of bed every morning with a smile on my face. I feel that it's a blessing to be able to use my natural interests and something that makes me happy to earn a living and launch companies doing. Likewise, the SEO industry has given me the chance to meet like minded people who have become my friends, business partners and colleagues over the years.
One piece of advice to the SEOs out there? Be patient and don't jump to conclusions too quickly. Make the time to sit back, observe the market, observe the competitive landscape and the complete history of the site you're working on before executing a major decision. Historic archives of a project and data do not lie. Sometimes as a consultant, and with client-side turnover, you may end up being the keeper of a site's legacy, so it's important to document those historic changes over time as they can help you build a case for your direction and/or against an impulsive decision.
Also, look at the quality of traffic and audience as a core success metric at the end of the day for almost anything you do. By doing so, you'll know that the content, links, mentions and exposure you achieve helps other facets of the company. Which makes what you do even more important. Quality is not a number put out by an SEO tool company, it's how your audience interacts with the site, and identifying the other properties which that audience visits and producing content which resonates with that audience ... from the outreach to landing page to product purchase in the decision making journey.
Favorite things in general? A lot of people don't know this, but I'm color blind, to the extent where I once bought a car that I thought was dark gray and it turned out to be purple. That being said, my favorite color is blue ... but sometimes what's blue to me is actually purple, brown or green.
What you want to be known for in the SEO space? I want to be known for dedicating a large part of my life to spreading the ongoing education of search and defending the integrity of SEO.
It's also been nice to have the legacy of mentoring many over the years; whether it has been the good folks have worked with me in the past and present; or what I can proudly leave behind on the client performance side of things... as well as being able to give others the opportunity to share their thoughts and learnings about search; whether it be from my publication, conferences, broadcasts ... etc.
To learn more about Loren, check out his stories on Search Engine Journal, this past interview on him, connect with him on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.
This is part of the say something nice about an SEO/SEM series - feel free to nominate someone over here.
