In the late 1990s, I began helping friends with their websites (as the one who knew a little bit about HTML then learned how to design websites in notepad) and learned how to get them ranking well in the search engines for keywords. After college, this morphed into a real life job doing SEO for hundreds of clients, all small-time B2C with competitive keywords and small budgets for PPC. I worked my way up to managing million dollar/month PPC campaigns across Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask and doing SEO for large B2C companies. I'm currently an in house seo/sem and have gladly left the agency life behind.