The Past

2006-2007

SEO Design Solutions was born. As the business grew to over 40 clients, we needed to make our SEO processes more modular and repeatable. Looking for ways to automate results we selected WordPress as a platform due to its popularity and pliability.

2008

The collaboration between WordPress expert John Lamansky and SEO Design Solutions founder Jeffrey Smith for our corporate SEO website led to the development of 3 SEO WordPress themes that we contributed to the open source community – Happy Landings, SEO Basics and the Small Business SEO Theme. The next step was the creation of SEO Ultimate as an in-house SEO toolbox (based on processes which we’d battle-tested over the years).

 2009-2011

In 2009 we grew by building powerful online tools for WordPress to manage our 700+ sites, creating custom themes for clients and sharing insider tips with the SEO community. Our SEO Design Solutions blog was gaining traction as a real resource for advanced SEO knowledge, while our client model was doing well. As a result, we decided to shelve further WordPress theme development.

Years passed and things were good. In a generous gesture (anticipating the benefit of the law of reciprocity) we decided to give away our most coveted WordPress plugin, “SEO Ultimate” for FREE and the rest is history…

 2012

Fast forward 3 years and SEO Ultimate achieved over 1.2 million downloads (and climbing) without active promotion aside from using the blog to alert users of new updates. Meanwhile, the idea of remaining an SEO service provider was less appealing for two reasons.

1) Google and other search engines were constantly obfuscating their algorithms and trying to reverse engineer changes was a losing battle (penguin this, panda that, you name it there was a penalty for it) and 2) rather than just help a few people with our service model, by creating software, we could help thousands as a result.

So, we began working on the SEO Design Framework to complement the advanced functionality of SEO Ultimate plugin. The motto that emerged was – “Create Websites that Rank as Great as they Look“, and that became our mission.

We’d also dabbled with the idea of a module for creating websites using silo architecture. Our first effort was limited to adding categories and posts en masse, but eventually we were able to completely rewrite WordPress’s taxonomy to create perfect website silo architecture including pages, sub pages, categories and posts. We consider this an epic achievement since  (to our knowledge) no company has ever built proper website silo architecture functionality into a framework before and offered it to the public.

  2013

With thousands of collective hours invested in development, SEO Design Solutions says farewell to clients in order to exclusively focus on the framework. Even though John and Mary have both moved on to pursue other interests, their contributions served as a base for “code conquistador” Aleksandar Djuric to refine and extend the SEO Design Framework.