Awards, Recognition & Various Appointments

Individual Verizon Excellence Award

Chris Silver Smith was awarded Verizon’s Individual Excellence Award in 2003 for his pioneering research and development work within the company on SEO for Superpages.com. The work increased company revenues by over $5 million in its first year.

SEMMY 2008 Local Search Winner

Awarded the Local Search SEMMY for writing an article, “Anatomy & Optimization Of A Local Business Profile“ at Search Engine Land. The SEMMYs acknowledged the year’s best posts in search engine marketing.

Vice President of Programming, DFW SEM

Chris Silver Smith was a member of the board of the Dallas-Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association (DFWSEM) for a number of years, and was elected VP of Programming in 2016.

SEO Advisory Board Member

Smith served as an advisor to Thomson Reuters FindLaw from 2010 to 2015, advising on the company’s organic Search Engine Marketing strategies and product development for its thousands of law firm clients.

Advisory Board Member

Smith served as an advisory board member for UniversalBusinessListing.org, a service of UBL Interactive, Inc., from 2010 to 2016.

Hierarchical Category Index Navigational System

Patent #US 8,346,751 B1 was granted in 2013.

Smith worked on the Verizon team that developed the earliest map-based local search interface, and this navigational technology was a part of it. It allowed users to navigate the map-based interface via the selection of categories of items (such as local businesses).

Stackable Icons

Patent #US 8,555,203 B1 was granted in 2013.

This innovative invention was used to facilitate navigation and usability within an information-dense interface where icon representations of items could be so heavily concentrated that selecting singular items could be difficult. The Stackable Icons allow for groups of icons to be clustered under a single icon for selection in a list.