Before I get into “Why Chris McElroy SEO”, I want to give you a little background. When you’ve done something more than 10,000 times, you’re supposed to be considered an expert according to an old saying. And when you’ve been doing something and you’re consistently successful at it, you start to believe you’re an expert and maybe, at times, we don’t see the forest for the trees.
I built my first website in 1996. It was about how to build a website. I was buying, selling, brokering and appraising domain names for a living and I was advising people to build a website or at least a landing page on each domain they are trying to sell so they can tell potential buyers why they registered that name and the ideas they had in mind for its use.
I made a website that was basically a step-by-step guide on how to build these websites. I built it as I learned. At the bottom of each page, I simply wrote, “If you still have questions, email me and I’ll try to help you”. And I was truly just trying to be helpful. Almost every email I received was something like “I don’t have time”, “I don’t like to write”, “I don’t know how to…”, etc. along with “How much would you charge to just build it for me?”.
Just being helpful led to a business that’s still here almost 30 years later. It will be 30 years in February, 2026.
What Was SEO Like In The 90s?
SEO in the 90s was definitely different. We’ve come a long way from learning to write HTML and trying to rank pages in Alta Vista, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, Dogpile, Magellan, Excite, Webcrawler, Hotbot, Infoseek & DMOZ (Open Directory Project). If you were around then, you probably remember Yahoo used to have a “Powered by Google” notice at the top of their directory. Google wasn’t even a search portal when I started.
And no one had shortened Search Engine Optimization to SEO yet.
Just A Little History
I was managing a webmaster forum that taught about affiliate marketing in the 90s and everyone thought I was crazy when I added a forum topic called Search Engine Optimization. And yes, it was much easier when there were a lot of search engines that weren’t nearly as sophisticated as Google is today.
The results pages on most of them had percentages next to each link. 98% relevant, 95% relevant, 90% relevant, ets. as you went down the results for your searched for keywords. To become more relevant? More keywords than the one above you used. It was a little more complicated, but you get the idea.
But, Magellan had a cool tool called Magellan Voyeur and no it wasn’t a porn thing. It was a page that refreshed every 15 seconds. It showed what people actually typed in the search field. Not just what keywords were being searched for, the exact way they typed it in. I spent a lot of time studying that because knowing user behavior is way more valuable than just knowing the most popular keywords.
Now We Can Get To Why
"Chris McElroy SEO" & My Duh Moment
Shocker. I’m not the only person named Chris McElroy. There’s a real estate guy, another web designer, a soccer player, a film composer, an actor from Two And A Half Men, and more. I wanted potential clients and customers to easily find out more about me, so I came up with adding SEO to the end of my name and reinforced that by creating content using that nickname so that when you search for Chris McElroy SEO, almost all of the results point to something about me.
No big accomplishment, but it served the purpose. Part of that was to make it my username on social media platforms and other places.
For example:
- https://www.facebook.com/chrismcelroyseo
- https://www.pinterest.com/ChrisMcElroySEO
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismcelroyseo/
- https://www.tumblr.com/blog/chrismcelroyseo
- https://chrismcelroyseo.blogspot.com
You get the idea. And it worked as it should.
Now Comes The DUH Moment
You know you think you have a handle on things and sometimes you miss the most obvious things.
Until 2025, I never thought to register ChrisMcElroySEO.com
So, for someone that has been very successful at promoting my clients and doing branding for them, I missed out on a crucial element of my own branding. I had been branding myself, although it wasn’t the initial reason for the strategy. I did business under a different company name, was a ghostwriter for so many brands and still missed branding myself intentionally.
See? No matter how long you do this, you can still miss the forest for the trees.
I hope you enjoy laughing about my little epiphany, because I’m laughing at it too.
But don’t make the mistake of not treating your own identity as a brand separate from your business branding. Just like NAP needs to be consistent everywhere for your company, your personal name should also be consistent across platforms. Help people find you.
Learn more about Chris McElroy SEO Agency and our team’s philosophy here.
That Being Said, I Can Still Help You As I Have Many Others
When I offer a free consultation, I do not show slides or case studies. I don’t do a “presentation” or “demo” a sales pitch.
I listen to you.
In order to really help you succeed, I need to know about your business, but also about what drives you and what your goals are. And that doesn’t just mean what your business offers right now, today, but what are your future plans for the business?
I recently met with a potential client that runs a security company. They offer event security, event medical services, event staffing and temporary fencing for events. He told me all about that. I asked him what he plans for the future of the business. It made him stop and think. He said he really wants to get into loss prevention and retail security. When I did give him a proposal, it included helping him attract clients for loss prevention and retail security.
Of course, I’ll answer any questions you have about us in our meeting as well. I’ll even give you some free do-it-yourself advice.
The best article I have ever written was called, “How To Make Money On The Internet – Be Helpful.
It’s how my business started and it remains our philosophy today. I built that first website just trying to be helpful and look how that worked out.
So, if you’re ready for an actual free consultation…
