Who Is David Cragg, the Tucson SEO Consultant Behind SEO Tucson?

Most SEO pages say "years of experience" and leave it there. This one names the companies, the dates and the buyers, and links to the SEC filings and trade press where you can check them. If you're about to hand someone your website, you should be able to verify who they are first.

The company history below is backed by the public records listed under sources. The opinions about what makes SEO work are mine, and I've written them that way.

What Did I Do Before 1990?

Economics and computer science at UCLA, then an MBA in marketing at the University of Washington. After that I held sales, marketing and technical jobs at Microsoft, Exxon, SMC and a string of other technology companies.

That mix turned out to matter. Economics taught me to distrust a number until I know how it was collected. Computer science means I can read what a developer hands me instead of taking their word for it. Marketing is why I care whether the phone rings, more than whether a chart went up.

What Was Lotus411?

In 1990 I formed DVGM & Associates to run Lotus411, a help desk and community for the administrators and developers keeping IBM Lotus Notes and Domino running inside large organizations. Notes was enormous then, and the people running it had almost nowhere to go for a straight answer. We built the technical tips library, the discussion rooms and the mentoring that community was missing.

Underneath the community was the actual business: internet marketing for the third-party vendors selling into the Notes and Domino market. I used that model for the next fifteen years. Build the place the technical audience already wants to be, then help the vendors reach them in a way the audience trusts. Lotus411 ran for a decade, and in 2000 TechTarget acquired it.

A note for anyone checking. Lotus411 stopped publishing a long time ago, and there's no press release online for it the way there is for MSD2D. The domain name now belongs to an unrelated jewelry shop. If you search the name, that's what you'll find, and I'd rather tell you than have you wonder.

What Was MSD2D?

About a month after the Lotus411 sale closed in 2000, I started MSD2D, short for Microsoft Developer-to-Developer, out of Lake Forest, California. It used the Lotus411 approach on Microsoft's products instead of IBM's. I ran it for five years, and it grew faster than Lotus411 ever did.

We built communities around Microsoft's server products. ExchangeD2D came first. SharePointD2D followed, and Microsoft announced it in its own newsroom in February 2002 and quoted me. Then .NET, SQL and security. Each site carried free code, Web Parts, administrator tips, mentored discussion rooms, a product directory and a weekly newsletter. By the time we sold, the SharePoint directory alone listed hundreds of third-party products. The business underneath was internet marketing for the vendors in those markets, and we did it for thousands of them.

What Were the MSD2D People's Choice Awards?

We ran the MSD2D People's Choice Awards, voted on by the administrators and developers using the products and presented at Microsoft Tech·Ed. Categories covered imaging, security, workflow, charting, IP telephony and more.

The awards are the clearest outside evidence of what MSD2D was, because companies still list them on their own sites twenty years later. Equilibrium announced its third consecutive win at Tech·Ed in Orlando in 2005. Nevron lists its 2005 win in .NET charting and graphing.

Who Did We Work With?

The large companies came to us because of what we produced for the small vendors. Fortune 100 marketing departments could see results they weren't getting from their own agencies.

Why Did Both Buyers Want the Companies?

TechTarget acquired Lotus411 in 2000. On August 8, 2005, Penton Media acquired MSD2D and put it into its Windows IT Pro Group. Penton's announcement named me as the founder, and the transaction is recorded in Penton's SEC filings, linked below.

One detail before you read them. Penton's announcement dates the business to 1990, and MSD2D didn't launch until 2000. Both are correct. The legal entity behind both sites, DVGM & Associates, was formed in 1990 to run Lotus411, and Penton bought the stock of that company. The 10-Q names it.

Both buyers gave the same reason: they wanted to understand how we'd been so effective at internet marketing for small vendors. Neither of them figured it out. They lost the investment and they lost our clients, because a large company can't stop behaving like a large company. Small vendors needed someone who answered the phone and changed the plan the same week. They got a process instead. I learned more from watching that happen to my own former clients than from anything else in thirty-five years.

What Was Temecula SEO?

I retired at 50, thanks to God's blessings. It held for about two years.

In 2007 I started Temecula SEO for the same reason MSD2D and Lotus411 had worked: small vendors. A dentist in Temecula and an independent software vendor in Redmond have the same problem. Both are invisible to the people already looking for them, both have been sold a website that was never built to be found, and neither has anyone trustworthy to ask. The budgets are smaller and the work is the same.

That practice ran fifteen years across Southern California: dental practices, contractors, home services and professional offices. Some of those clients are still with me.

Why Did the Practice Move to Tucson?

I moved to Tucson in June 2022, and the practice came with me. Temecula SEO became SEO Tucson. If you found me under the old name, you're in the right place. I kept the Southern California clients who wanted to stay, because none of this work requires me to be in the room.

What Do I Do Now?

SEO Tucson is what I do with the time. I take a small number of clients, do the work myself, and charge well below the usual agency rate because I'm not covering anyone's payroll or office rent. The person who writes your title tags is the person who answers when you call. How that compares with a typical agency, line by line, is on what SEO costs in Tucson.

The internet is still the cheapest marketing there is, and most small companies still don't know how to use it. In my experience almost no web designer understands what produces a top-ten Google listing. They build something attractive and assume Google will notice, and it doesn't. People use Google to satisfy their curiosity, look up their symptoms and find businesses like yours. Getting found when they search is the whole job.

What do I work on, specifically?

• Technical SEO. Crawl and index problems, canonical conflicts, redirects, Core Web Vitals and the hosting-layer settings nobody mentions until they break your site. More on technical SEO.
• Structured data. Sitewide entity graphs, LocalBusiness and Person markup, service and FAQ schema, and duplicate-schema cleanup. Most sites I inherit have three schema blocks contradicting each other.
• Local SEO. Google Business Profile, name, address and phone consistency, city and service pages, review systems and Map Pack analysis. More on local SEO.
• Content. Search intent, cannibalization audits, page rebuilds and internal linking, written to sound like the person who does the work. More on content.
• Platforms. WordPress, Avada, WPCode, Rank Math, Yoast Premium, and managed hosting with all its quirks.
• Measurement. Search Console, GA4 and rank tracking, and a plain account of what moved and what didn't.

What Credentials Do I Have, and Which Don't I Have?

• BA, economics with a minor in computer science, UCLA, cum laude
• MBA, marketing, with honors, University of Washington
• Founder and president of Lotus411, 1990 to 2000
• Founder and president of MSD2D, 2000 to 2005

I don't have a wall of SEO certifications, and I'd rather say so than pad this page. Those programs didn't exist for most of my career, and the ones that exist now are vendor training courses that take an afternoon. There's no licensing body for this work. Judge me on the Penton filing and the Microsoft press release instead. They took fifteen years to earn.

What Changed When the Practice Moved to Tucson?

Three things changed when Temecula SEO became SEO Tucson, and each one is something I now check for clients who move or rename.

The reviews stayed behind. Most of my Google reviews were left on the Temecula SEO profile, and every testimonial on this site says which profile it came from. A move or a new name can leave your review history behind too, which is why I wrote up what happens to your Google reviews after a rebrand or move.

The phone number changed. After the move, an old block of structured data on this site kept printing the retired Temecula phone numbers on every page, next to the correct Tucson number. Cleaning up a business's name, address and phone across the web is slow work, and it's part of local SEO for every client.

The market works differently. Tucson splits into separate Map Pack contests by area, so I work town by town: Oro Valley, Marana, Catalina Foothills, Sahuarita, Green Valley and Vail, plus South Tucson, Corona de Tucson, Oracle, Tubac and Benson.

Who Do I Work With?

Companies whose owners are committed to growing. Size doesn't decide it, because my best clients are small. Seriousness does. SEO takes months and some of the owner's attention. If you want a monthly report that looks good and changes nothing, there are agencies for that, and they'll charge you several times what I do. If you'd rather hand the whole thing to one person, here's everything the $1,000 a month covers, and the case studies show the longest-running engagements.

What Do Clients Say About Working With David?

Four of the ten reviews on my Google profiles, quoted in full. Most were left on the Temecula SEO profile during the Southern California years, before the practice moved to Tucson in 2022. The one labeled SEO Tucson names the new business in the review itself.

Where Does the Information on This Page Come From?

None of the following was written by me or is controlled by me.

• SEC EDGAR: Penton Media's announcement of the MSD2D acquisition, August 9, 2005. Names me as founder and dates the business to 1990, when DVGM & Associates was formed.
• SEC EDGAR: Penton Media Form 10-Q. Records the August 8, 2005 acquisition of DVGM & Associates, doing business as MSD2D.
• Microsoft newsroom: MSD2D.com launches resource for SharePoint developers, February 4, 2002. Quotes me as president of MSD2D.com.
• BizWest: Penton Media acquires California IT business.
• Ad Age: Penton Media acquires MSD2D.
• ITPro Today, 2006. Cites MSD2D's SharePoint technical library a year after the sale.
• Equilibrium and Nevron, two vendors still listing their MSD2D People's Choice Awards.
• David Cragg on LinkedIn.

Written by David Cragg, Tucson SEO consultant, in search since 1990.

On how this site is written: I use AI tools to draft and to check my own work. AI does not supply the facts about your business, it does not invent sources, and nothing goes up here that I have not read first. If you find a claim on this site you can't verify, call me and I'll fix it or pull it.

Page last reviewed October 26, 2026 by David Cragg.