There are many pivotal moments in a life time and one of mine occurred earlier this month when I made the difficult decision to resign from CafePress as the in-house SEO Analyst.  After nearly two years of dedicated service I felt my time was up as my professional long-term vision no longer aligned with company goals.

This is not to say CafePress wasn’t a great place to work.  In fact, that could be further from the truth because I absolutely LOVED my time there.  I worked with some of the brightest minds in the online marketing industry and learned a lot from everyone.

For example, I had the opportunity to get my feet wet in large scale PPC campaigns when I was given control of a few (very small) accounts courtesy of Jenny Chen.  Thanks to Edward Kwong I learned how the Facebook Advertising platform works and together we pioneered an internal bidding algorithm.  Lastly, working with Hillary Roulette showed me how complicated it can be to construct an entire affiliate program from scratch.

There are two individuals who I can never thank enough for advancing my entire SEO career though.  The first is Pratul Lakhotia who essentially taught me the ropes of SEO and helped shape me up for the business world.  He is smart, extremely capable and a force to be reckoned with when it comes to website optimization.

The second is Nicholas Gadacz who took me under his wing and showed me the technical, scalable side of SEO which I immediately fell in love with.  Nick is very intelligent, a natural born leader and I’m not sure where I’d be without his guidance.

I had a great time working with every last one of them and would definitely do it again if I had the chance.  Unfortunately, I can’t do shout outs to everyone but if I missed you I apologize in advance as this does not mean you were any less important.  Every single person at CafePress was amazing to work with and is definitely THE company to work for in the coming years.

As for myself, I’ll be joining Macys.com as their Assistant Marketing Manager of SEO (quite a mouthful) where I’ll be doing even more awesome stuff.  I start this coming Monday (7/2/2012) and I already can’t wait for Sunday to be over.