Meet the Founders

Ben Wills: Co-Founder, CEO

In 2008 Ben Wills co-founded Ontolo, a link building research service that identifies and prioritizes a website’s inbound link opportunities. Ben conceived, architected, built and continues to optimize Ontolo’s link prospect gathering and qualification tools, in addition to co-writing the Link Building Guide, which leads motivated readers through the methods and processes of large-scale, crawler-based link research, link acquisition and linker-targeted content strategy.

Beginning in 2001 Ben was integrally involved with the growth of the largest search marketing company in the world and in 2005 became the Vice President of Operations in a search marketing startup that had profits on a cash basis of 25% with 23 employees after 9 months. In 2006 he began consulting full time on SEO, social media marketing strategy and link building.

Garrett French: Co-Founder, Chief Marketer

Garrett French, along with Ben Wills, co-founded Ontolo, a large-scale link building agency that leverages in-house technologies to find, evaluate and prioritize rank-influencing inbound links. Garrett co-wrote Link-Building-Guide.com, also with Ben Wills, and writes regularly for the Ontolo Link Building Blog.

Garrett covered the search and search optimization industry for WebProNews from 2001 – 2004 and then for Search Engine Lowdown through 2006. Garrett has contributed to numerous publications, including Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Guide, Marketing Profs, Search Marketing Standard (web and print), ISEdb, and more. Since 2006 Garrett has built engagement, sales, search presence and links with content and content strategy for his clients.