Welcome, I’m Simon Heseltine. I’m currently the Senior Marketing Manager for AOL Inc. working on all brands under the News & Information umbrella; such as FanHouse (formerly AOL Sports), MMAFighting, and AOLNews. In this position I’m responsible for planning and implementing SEO projects and trainings for all of these brand channels. As the company has moved into a content based strategy this has opened up a lot of opportunities with these brand channels. Unfortunately my NDA doesn’t allow me to disclose numbers, but the growth in daily SEO referrals since I’ve been here has been fantastic (which has to do with the voracious appetite that the development and programming teams have had for learning and implementing as many SEO best practices as possible).
I am a frequent public speaker at conferences around the US (and a few in the UK) on all manner of topics related to online marketing, and have published articles for various online industry sites over the years.
Prior to AOL I was the Director of Search for a DC based digital consulting company – Serengeti Communications, where I worked with various clients to improve their SEO & Social Media efforts through audits & training. But what’s the rest of the story?
Back in 1992 I graduated with a BA (hons) degree in Business Administration (minors in Marketing and Programming) from the University of Humberside in Hull, England, along with a diploma from the Institute of Administrative Management in Orpington Kent. I then immediately moved to the US. After a few years of working in the IT / Marketing department of a millwork firm, I went back to school, taking programming courses at the Chubb Institute in Philadelphia.
After graduating top of the class I began working for SID designing bolt-on applications for SAP’s R/3 ERP system. Following SID, I went to work for a 46,000 person corporation in Harrisburg PA, designing and developing their Factory Systems Management system (emphasis on quality management).
After a year as a consultant, I settled down in the D.C. region, and began working for SynXis. 15 months into that relationship the company was spun off into 2 pieces, the arm I went with became Innovectra, and was involved with developing platforms for Yellow Pages publishers to get their books online. We grew from 8 employees at the start to over 100.
Early in 2005 we had many of the top YP publishers on the platform, but the traffic wasn’t getting to the site, so it was decided to form an in-house Search Marketing department. I was chosen to set up and run that department.
By early 2007 my team of 6 was running PPC campaigns for books for 11 local and regional publishers, as well as for over 800 small, local businesses. We had also architected and implemented SEO best practices to enable the sites to rank highly for certain key terms.
