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A History Of Search Engine Optimization
Anyone involved in any sort of Internet marketing sees the term, "search engine optimization", or SEO, everywhere these days. It crops up again and again in forums and advertising alike. People provide their "SEO services" for fees ranging from a few bucks to hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Everybody seems poised to provide free advice on how to effectively incorporate SEO into YOUR web site.
However, hardly anyone ever comes out and says WHAT search engine optimization really is! So, as we explore the history of SEO, let's try to get an idea of what it is and what it does.
At its simplest, search engine optimization is the art and/or science (often more art than science) of making web pages MORE attractive to the Internet search engines. Obviously, most Internet businesses will consider search engine optimization to be one of THE major factors of any search engine marketing plan or program.
So, how did a need for "optimizing" a web site so as to attract the attention of search engines come about?
In the mid 90's search engine optimization was pretty basic. Many of the available "search engines" back then really weren't much more than web crawling directories that extracted a bit more data from the site than was submitted originally by the web site owner.
Even in those days, a good quality search engine was able to perform some discriminatory evaluation and assign a search engine rank based on the relevance of the site's informational content and other data such as keywords, description, and textual and graphic content. Unfortunately, although the search engine web crawler, or spider, was able to extract a certain amount of data, a large portion of a site's ability to achieve high search engine rank depended on material submitted by the webmaster.
Webmasters soon realized that by using various techniques they could improve their site's search engine rank. One such technique was manipulating content by increasing the usage of keywords, often to huge multiples generally hidden in the background of the site. In this way they could raise their site's search engine rank. A higher rank meant more visitors, which usually meant more money.
Enter the search engine algorithm. "Algorithm" is possibly one of the least understood words commonly found on the Internet. Simply put, the algorithm is the set of instructions that has been provided to the software that the search engine uses to assign search engine ranking.
Now, it isn't as if search engine algorithms didn't exist before, but as the webmasters got better at subverting the existing algorithms, the search engines tweaked their algorithms to counter their tricks and ploys.
One major change was that search engines began to place less faith on the submissions of the webmasters and developed software capable of investigating the site itself and forming conclusions on what it actually found there. Instead of the webmaster filling in a form providing a title, description, and a bunch of keywords, the search engine software began to look more deeply for itself and make logical determinations about what it found.
For example, rather than just accepting the webmaster's word that keywords "weight loss", "diet", and "exercise" were applicable to the subject matter of the site and then checking to see if those words were there, the software began looking at a long líst of factors. It would look at the domain name, and the words used in the title. It would see how often keywords appeared, how close they were together, and the sequence in which they appeared. It would analyze such things as what the "ALT" attribute attached to images contained, and what the META tags had to say. Most important of all, it would look at the textual content of the site to get a major feel for the way all these things came together and how they matched the claims of the webmaster and the expectations of the search engine's clients.
Now you see why so many people say, "Content is king!"
However, for a major search engine such as Google, web site content alone was not enough to insure that its customers were seeing the most valuable search results and that web sites were getting the most accurate page rank. Therefore, Google developed a system known as "Page Rank" which also looks at the number of incoming links to the site. In other words, how many other sites around the Internet considered this site relevant to the interests of their clients and hence of value to the interests of the search engines' clients.
As search engines became bigger and more powerful, and as webmasters became more inventive at circumventing their algorithms, the major search engines such as Google made their particular algorithms tightly controlled secrets. This has made it extremely difficult for amateur webmasters and search engine optimization services alike to predict exactly which technique or tactic was going to be the most successful for achieving a high web page rank on a given search engine. However, some deductions have been made based on the pages and sites that DO seem to achieve high page ranks with Google and other search engines.
Techniques such as picking a relevant domain name, including important keywords and phrases in the title, having keywords show up in such places as the image ALT tag, and stressing keywords through the use of headline text are all of importance. Having lots of inbound links from relevant sites is important as is internal linking (the development and value of the sitemap is another important topic).
It appears that as search engine algorithms expand their capabilities they begin to approach the viewpoint of the human web site viewer. As a human would ask, "Does this site make sense and provide relevant data in an understandable manner?", so too are search engines becoming more interested in the structure and content of the web site.
Search engine crawlers are becoming more efficient as well in simply finding your site if someone somewhere has considered it important enough to provide a link from their web site to yours. This is another reason why links from other pages can be important for getting your web site indexed in the first place as well as helping get it a good page rank.
As in the good old days of the Internet in '90's, the most common means of offering your web site to a search engine for its consideration is by a simple task of filling in a form. Although search engines are now asking you for less and less information about the site; they prefer to go and get it themselves. However, filling in the form does not guarantee immediate, or even soon, indexing of your site...if it happens at all.
From the viewpoint of the search engine or the human visitor, while various techniques of search engine optimization are important, the quality of the content provided to your visitor is probably going to be the best search engine optimization method of all.