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Eric Ward: Father of Online Publicity
Eric Ward got his start in advertising and public relations. He didn’t own his first computer until 1991. At that time, he worked for Time, Inc./Whittle Communications as a regional marketing director, in charge of marketing for Special Reports with Joan Lunden. When Whittle Communications went bankrupt, in 1992, Eric decided to go back to school for a graduate degree in Library and Information Sciences. Here, he got his first exposure to search engines and information retrieval. He saw the potential right away from an advertising perspective—he knew search engines were going to be big. He approached a local ISP in his hometown of Knoxville with his idea for a web-based promotion business, and the company hired him on the spot to handle website promotion for all their clients. This was around 1994, and this makes Eric one of the very first search engine optimization pros. Eric says that his greatest expertise is in helping great web content find an audience. He believes that great content is the key to a website’s search engine rankings—a site with great content will generate links naturally, over time. It’s the best way to get links, because it’s in accord with the search engines’ desire to sort out the best, most helpful and informative sites for each user’s keywords. If your site is a great resource, it will naturally generate links—and it will deserve to be in the top rankings. To that end, in 1995, Eric launched URLwire, a site dedicated to announcing useful web content. The website now has over 150,000 readers each month. He is also one of the world’s foremost experts on linking, and was behind the first linking campaigns of several high-profile websites, including Amazon.com, The Discovery Channel, Microsoft, The Link Exchange, WarnerBros, and PBS.org. In addition, Eric is a contributing writer to several online journals, including ClickZ and Ad Age. In 1995, Eric won the Tenagra Award for Internet Marketing Excellence—a prestigious honor. Two years later, Websight Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people on the web. He’s a frequent four-star speaker at Search Engine Strategies conferences, and publishes The Ward Report, a monthly newsletter with a focus on the newest trends and techniques in search engine optimization. Today, Eric lives in the South with his son, Noah, and his wife—who is Vice President of his company, The Ward Group.
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