History of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is the way in which web masters structure a web site using various tactics so that the web site shows up on search engines when millions of people search for specific keywords. Incorporating popular and relevant keywords on the web site is one aspect of SEO. The goal is to increase the amount and quality of traffic to a site.

The Early Days of SEO

As the Internet grows and becomes more advanced, so does SEO. It was during the mid 1990s where SEO was initially developed and used by web masters who would get a site listed in Yahoo by submitting the URL. Yahoo and other search engines would then send out spiders to crawl the pages and the extracted information would then get indexed. It was in 1997 that the term "search engine optimization" was first used.

During the late 1990s, talks about SEO built up and programmers began to really understand what is occurring in the SEO community. An increasing number of web masters began to realize that showing up and having high rankings in search engines is valuable for a website. Algorithms and meta tags were first used to index pages.

Keywords, Rankings and Google

Keyword density played a big role in the early days of SEO, which lead to falsified rankings. It was at this stage that search engines began to adapt and show relevant search results instead of pages that were only filled with keywords. This meant search engines had to develop more advanced ranking algorithms and webmasters had a harder time manipulating results. When Google was founded in 1998, it made an effort early on to ensure that webmasters cannot manipulate rankings. Google achieved this by taking into consideration both off-page factors, such as PageRank, and on-page factors, such as keywords, meta tags, and headings.

During the late 1990s, people began developing link building tools and link spamming occurred as a result. Over the next few years, search engines developed even more complex ranking algorithms and did not disclose any of their information to fight spam and other ranking issues.

Google and Yahoo became search engine leaders, constantly striving to tackle issues of spamming and ranking manipulation. A challenge search engines began to face is paid links that help transfer PageRank. Beginning in 2007, Google took measures to prevent search engine optimizers from using nofollow links for PageRank. This led to the use of Javascript and other techniques to allow PageRank sculpting.

Real Time Search and SEO

The latest development in SEO history is real-time-search, which was introduced in 2009. The idea of real-time-search is to make search results more timely for users. This works hand in hand with the tremendous growth of social media web sites and blogs that add fresh content on a daily basis, allowing for more timely and relevant search results. Now, the SEO community is placing more value on fresh and unique content.