I am from New Haven, went to University of Connecticut, got my B.S. in Management Information Systems and started my own business with my 2 partners in 2003.
I may be a bit of an anomoly in this community but nonetheless I believe in people helping themselves, particularly as it regards earning traffic from search engines.
If your website is designed and developed to earn competitive rankings in search engines like Google, you help your business by increasing your presence in a market where potential customers come looking for you!
My philosophy regarding SEO is that the search engines want to list the best of thousands of websites as the top 10 results for any given keyword phrase. If you website is formed into a great answer for the implied questions in a given keyword phrase, search engines will reward youwith a first page ranking!
One of my favorite quotes:
"No matter what your product is, you are ultimately in the education business. Your customers need to be constantly educated about the many advantages of doing business with you, trained to use your products more effectively, and taught how to make never-ending improvement in their lives. "
Robert G Allen
I like that quote because most folks have a hard time grasping the abstract world of how search engines secretively define what sites deserve to be on their first page of results. Myself and my company do just that, and by reading pages of results and reviewing the sites that consistently perform the best we tune ourselves to this so that we can effectively guide the development of new and existing client websites such that they can reap the rewards of being there when potential customers come searching.