Tom Rusling, Ben Fox, JaVaun Moradi: Search Octane Advisory

Tom Rusling: Bio

Tom Rusling began initially working on personal Internet e-commerce projects in 2000. After receiving an MBA in strategy and finance from the University of Rochester Simon School of Business in 2003, Rusling took on the project of spearheading the development of content and e-commerce site wavelife.com, the online companion portal for Wave Magazine, a joint venture between media giant Knight Ridder, Inc. and online travel auction site SkyAuction.com.

In early 2005, Rusling migrated over to SkyAuction.com full time to spearhead a full revamp of the company’s paid and organic search engine marketing programs. SEO optimized structure changes increased overall organic traffic by 150% in the first three months: this increase being driven almost entirely by newly ranked keyword terms. Subsequent content generation, With continued SEO best practice strategies being integrated into the organization’s daily operations, continued content generation, and ongoing link building, SkyAuction saw an additional increase of 130% year over year in their organic traffic.

A subsequent landing page optimization program was launched in August 2006. This program, complimented by an enhanced registration process, has produced a 60% reduction in cost per acquisition for the company’s paid search advertising programs.

Starting to take on additional outside consulting projects in 2006, Tom left his full time employment engagement in November to Co-Found Search Octane and leverage his expertise to a variety of established and start-up online businesses.

Ben Fox: Bio

Late in 2002, I joined Overture / Yahoo and worked there for nearly four years as a product manager on their Search, Content Match, RSS, and YPN products. I launched products that significantly impacted bottom line revenue and are still running live on Yahoo! today.

In early 2001, I was CEO of a job-matching software company. We had angel funding and ran this company out of my house before getting office space. True startup experience.

In 1998, I worked in technical pre-sales at Trilogy Software, Inc in Austin, TX. I helped mid-tier enterprise software systems into the market.

Javaun Moradi: Bio

Javaun's core expertise lies in practical application of web technologies to solve business goals. As a developer and an analyst, he seeks first to understand business objectives and then create an appropriate, measurable solution.

Javaun cut his teeth as a multimedia developer at IBM Global Services, working on clients such as State Farm and SBC Communications. Following IBM, Javaun was a Producer at Move.com, the internet's largest real estate network, working on content distribution deals with partners such as AOL and Fannie Mae. He then consulted independently for notable public and not-for-profit corporations, including WebMD.com, CARE International.

Javaun then spent nearly 4 years at Beazer Homes as a developer, analyst, and most recently served the corporate marketing department as their internet manager. Despite the homebuilding industry being down dramatically in 2007, Javaun's lead generation efforts significantly outperformed 2006 levels. At Beazer, he also served as a delegate to the leading homebuilding industry consortium where he participated in joint software and marketing development with other top companies.

Javaun's experience spans website look/feel creation, programming and database development, partner XML feeds and syndication, formalized usability testing, analytics and forecasting, and implementation of search optimization recommendations.