About Mike Moran

Mike Moran is an expert in Internet marketing, search technology, Web personalization, and Web metrics, who regularly makes speaking appearances. Mike's previous appearances include Search Engine Strategies, ad:tech, DM Days, the Internet Strategy Forum Summit, and the Enterprise Search Summit.

Mike is a freelance consultant and public speaker who also serves as Chief Strategist for Converseon, a leading digital media marketing agency based in New York City. Prior to this position, Mike spent 30 years at IBM, rising to Distinguished Engineer, an executive-level technical position. Mike held various roles in his IBM career, including eight years at IBM's customer-facing Web site, ibm.com, most recently as the Manager of ibm.com Web Experience, where he led 65 information architects, Web designers, Webmasters, programmers, and technical architects around the world.

Mike is the co-author of the best-selling 2005 book Search Engine Marketing, Inc. (along with fellow search marketing expert Bill Hunt), which is now in its Second Edition (2008). Mike is also the author of the acclaimed Internet marketing book, Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules, named one of best business books of 2007 by the Miami Herald. Mike also writes the Biznology newsletter and blog, and columns for Revenue Magazine, Search Engine Guide, Internet Evolution, and WebProNews.

In addition to Mike's broad technical background, he holds an Advanced Certificate in Market Management Practice from the Royal UK Charter Institute of Marketing and is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. He is a member of the Search Engine Marketing Council of the Direct Marketing Association, and a charter member of the DMA's Interactive Marketing Advisory Board.

Mike worked at ibm.com from 1998 through 2006, pioneering IBM's successful search marketing program. IBM's Web site of over two million pages was a classic "big company" Web site that has traditionally been difficult to optimize for search marketing. Mike, working with Bill Hunt of Global Strategies International, developed a strategy for search engine marketing that works for any business, large or small. Moran and Hunt spearheaded IBM's content improvement that has resulted in dramatic gains in traffic from Google and other Internet portals. Their IBM Press book Search Engine Marketing, Inc., shows any business the steps to search marketing success. Both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and paid search techniques are explained.

Mike managed numerous projects at ibm.com, including continual upgrades to the ibm.com search engine. Mike is an expert in search technologies, developing technology at IBM Research, Lotus, and other IBM groups over the years, at one point serving as product manager for IBM's OmniFind search and text analytics products. In 1989, he led the product team that developed the first commercial linguistic search engine and has been granted four patents with several more pending. Mike developed the business model for search technology at ibm.com, justifying investment with the increased revenue from more customers finding what they are looking for. Mike introduced automatic categorization technology in 2001 and multifaceted search technology in 2003.

Mike also developed Task-Based Navigation for IBM's site-wide redesign in 2004 and led the personalization of those tasks in 2005 and 2006. The ibm.com home page now shows a list of tasks that customers commonly need to perform—following those links gets customers to their goals far more frequently than in the past. Visitors from select IBM clients have their tasks personalized by industry and other characteristics to speed their task completion.

In addition to Mike's career, he is the co-author of the Life Planners newsletter, a free monthly e-mail that helps parents of disabled children to develop a Life Plan, or Letter of Intent, for their child's care when they are no longer able to provide care. Mike is married to author Linda Moran. Mike and Linda have four children, David, Madeline, Marcella, and Dwight.