The History of SEO
The History of SEO
Many web owners know about the importance of Search Engine Optimization (seo) given that SEO can significantly improve the visibility of any website. Basically, SEO plays an important role on different kinds of internet businesses and searches that include local searches, video searches, academic searches, image searches, and many different kinds of searches usually conducted by internet users. The benefits associated with SEO can be traced back to the history of seo where website owners began optimizing sites for search engines in the 1990s.
Initially, when the first search engines were cataloging the early web, all webmasters were required to submit their website address or URL to various search engines to enable the process of the search engine ‘spiders’ to crawl their websites or pages. The main goals for the ‘spiders’ was to extract information from these websites and use the information to index the website or page.
The process typically involved search engine spiders downloading a page and storing the specific page on the search engine’s own server. A second program commonly referred to as an indexer extracted various information about the page where the words contained, links and keyword terms were placed into a scheduler for crawling at a much later date.
With this in mind, the history of SEO quickly began to change as website owners began to recognize the benefits that come with having their websites ranked high in search engine result pages. This paved way to the creation of opportunities for SEO practitioners. The first use of the term search engine optimization was used in 1997 by John Audette and his company, the Multimedia Marketing Group. Also, the first registered USA copyright of a website that contained the words was by Bruce Clay in 1997.
The initial versions of search algorithms heavily relied on webmaster – provided info like keyword Meta tag and index files. The Meta tags were used to provide a guide to each page’s content but were found to be unreliable. However, by relying on other aspects like keyword density that were exclusively within a webmaster’s control, many search engines at that time experienced manipulation of their rankings.
This never prevented search engines from coming up with better ways to provide their users with the most relevant search results from webmasters who used unscrupulous methods to get the best rankings on search engines. Mostly, the success of a search engine is dictated by its ability to produce relevant results to its users. As a result, many search engines including Google developed more difficult ranking algorithms that would not be manipulated by webmasters. For instance, Google calculated the algorithms mathematically to rate the importance or standing of the website pages which extended to calculating the quantity and strength of the links, keyword frequency, headings and site structure as available on the website being indexed.
This changed the history of SEO, since all web masters knew it would be very difficult to be beat the methods used in ranking their pages. Besides, many search engines continued to improve how they ranked websites and web pages to avoid any type of manipulation. Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing did not make known the algorithms they used in ranking pages. As a result, SEO providers like Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall, Rand Fishkin and Jill Whalen studied the various approaches to SEO that could prove beneficial to all website owners.
These SEO providers studied the patents for various search engines with the ability to gain an insight into the algorithms and published their opinions in online blogs and forums. By the year 2005, Google had begun a process of personalizing search results for each user basing this on the history of their previous searches. This made ranking different for each search and each user as was argued by Bruce Clay.
In 2007, Google made known of its campaign against paid links that transferred PageRanks where it followed this announcement by disclosing that they had taken measures to lessen the impact of PageRank sculpting by use of the no-follow attribute on links. This was done with the aim of preventing SEO service providers from using the no-follow for their PageRank sculpting. As a result, SEO engineers came up with alternative techniques that replaced no-follow but which would still be beneficial in increasing the chances for various websites to get better visibility. Some solutions that were suggested were use of Flash, iFrames and JavaScript.
The history of SEO gained significant milestones as many website owners knew what required getting better rankings and improving their businesses. Historically, website owners had spent a lot of time to optimize their websites to increase rankings by following search engine guidelines and having rich content that was also fresh.