Industrial Internet Marketing Pioneer Polysort Turns 20

    AKRON, OH, May 27, 2015 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Akron-based industrial Internet marketing provider Pilot Fish is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its parent company, Polysort LLC - founded at the very dawn of the commercial Internet.

"We created Polysort.com as a vertical portal for the polymer industry in 1995 - right around the time that 'Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web' officially became Yahoo and several years before Google," company President Angela Charles said.

"AltaVista, playing Google's role, was the search engine giant back then, followed by InfoSeek, Excite and a number of other search services that no longer exist," she said. "Yahoo is the only major service still functioning today, although it's morphed from its original role as the directory of everything to being a destination site offering all sorts of news and entertainment.

"Even our own company has changed since those very early years," Charles noted. "Polysort started as a local business directory of plastics and rubber companies and by early 1996 had become the first online information portal for the rubber and plastics market."

During that time, the firm quickly identified an industry-wide need for a trustworthy, knowledgeable Internet marketing partner that could create effective websites for rubber and plastics companies and help those manufacturers get found on the ever-growing World Wide Web.

"Not long after that, we realized that our web design, content creation and Internet marketing skills were easily transferrable from polymers to other industries, and we launched our Pilot Fish brand to market specifically to manufacturers, distributors and other industrial businesses outside of the rubber and plastics arena," Charles said.

Whether operating under the Polysort or Pilot Fish moniker, the company continued to foster its industrial clients' online success, helping to secure strong rankings on the search engines, drive targeted traffic to client websites and generate qualified leads for its growing customer base. In 2004, the company transitioned all its website development and SEO services to the Pilot Fish brand and maintained Polysort as the plastics and rubber industry portal.

"From the very beginning, search engine rankings were never our primary goal," Charles said. "Our priority has always been to use Internet marketing, and SEO specifically, as a tool to help our clients increase sales and grow their business."

While Pilot Fish has been steadfast in its mission over the last 20 years, Internet marketing itself has remained anything but static: By the company's 10th anniversary, the Internet had grown from an identifiable universe of 54,000 documents in 1994 to a bustling marketplace where more than 620 million online searches were performed daily.

That number was staggering in 2005, but it's barely a drop in the Internet bucket compared to the 3.5 billion searches Google estimates it currently processes every day.

Of course, Google itself has been the predominant driver of change on the Internet since its founding in 1998, moving to ban keyword stuffing and hidden text and links early on and continuing to popularize innovations like local listings, universal search and - most recently - mobile-friendly websites.

But through all the tumult ... the comings and goings of search favorites like Ask Jeeves and Hotbot to the transformation of MSN search into Bing and on through Google's myriad Panda-Penguin-Pigeon updates ... one thing has remained constant: Pilot Fish's dedication to guiding its clients through the turbulent sea of SEO and Internet marketing to find new customers and new sales.

"We're intensely proud of the role we've played in bringing effective, cost-efficient Internet marketing to B2B, industrial businesses," Charles said. "Our success in creating their success has laid a strong foundation for our future growth - no matter where the Internet might go."

About Pilot Fish and Polysort
Pilot Fish is the search engine optimization and website development division of Internet pioneer Polysort LLC, founded in 1995 in the Akron suburb of Bath, Ohio. Pilot Fish specializes in B2B Internet marketing, providing a wide variety of industrial companies with comprehensive website design, SEO and Internet marketing services.

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