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The Beginning of SEO

Filed Under Search Engine Optimization 

How did search engine optimization become so important? In this article we are going to discuss how it got started and how it has evolved. Sites started getting optimized in the mid 90’s. This is when search engines started cataloging the web. All you would need to do is submit your URL to the search engine and then they would come and crawl you site. After they crawled your site then they would index the page and store it on their server.

Then the search engine goes thru the pages and figures out what words are the most relevant. Those words are known as keywords. Those are the words that when someone types it in on a search engine, the sites that are the most relevant to your search will pop up. The phrase search engine optimization really came to use around 1997.

Owners of the sites began to notice the importance of having their site rank high. The higher the rank the more hits you are obviously going to get more hits. The rule of thumb is you want to rank in the top 30. Most people don’t go any further than three pages in. Most don’t even go that far in. So you want your site to pop up on the first page.

The early versions of search algorithms really depended on information provided by the webmaster. For example the keyword meta-tag or the files indexed in engines like ALIWEB. The ALIWEB is considered the first web search engine.

Meta tags provide a guide to each of the page’s content. Using meta data to index pages was not very reliable because sometimes the webmaster’s choice of keywords were not always accurate to the actual content on the site. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent data in meta caused pages to rank for keywords that had nothing to do with the site. Also the people who provided web content for the site manipulated a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page so that they could get better rankings.

Because the webmasters were abusing the search engines the search engines had to come up with a harder ranking algorithms. So that the webmasters would have a harder time manipulating the search engine.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a search engine that depended on a mathematical algorithm to rate the distinction of the web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, known as page rank. Page rank is the quantity and strength of inbound links. They also founded Google in 1998.

With Google two things were considered off-page and on-page factors. Off-page factors are your external links pointing to your website. The on-page factors are your keywords that are found on your site.

In 2007, the search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms. This helped to reduce the impact of link manipulation.
When search engines first came out they were easy to get high rankings because they were easy to manipulate. Now you really have to work hard to get the rankings. This is helpful to the people searching the search engine. It is now easier for them to find what they are looking for.

Matthew McKernan is the president of Mosaic Interactive, a premier website design and development firm located in Bethlehem, PA. http://www.mosaicwebsite.com

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