I got my start with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) when working at Barquin International with a tiny couple of page html site. But my real crash course in SEO occurred when I was working as the Director of Marketing & Sales at 1-800-Volunteer.org. 
One day the CFO came into my office and asked me why he couldn’t find our site in Google. At that time, my SEO experience did not include dynamically driven, complex sites so I told him that he needed to send me to SES Chicago where I would ask other SEOs to determine why our site had fallen off of Google.
So there I am at SES Chicago in an SEO audit session with about 200 other people. When they asked for volunteers, I was the first to raise my hands. After explaining that the developers had blocked Googlebot in the robot.txt file, I realized I was in for quite a lesson in enterprise SEO as they listed off issue after issue that I had to address in order to the site back into the Google index.
I left the session and called my development team to explain all the issues the audit session found with our site, and I spent the rest of the week at SES going to sessions, asking questions, and working every evening from my hotel room to build a full online marketing plan for the site, and an online marketing training plan so that all our the customers that used the site to recruit for volunteers could optimize their own volunteer postings.
Quite a few of the individuals who bought the 1-800-Volunteer.org volunteer management product were older women close to retirement age (or came out of retirement to run the Volunteer Center) and those were my first online marketing students. It was a great experience because I can now train anyone on SEO/online marketing regardless of their technical skill. Oh…and I got the site back in Google. :-)