Mar

SEO Marketing

Back in Time to Learn the History of SEO
As long as the Internet has been around, it has remained a
mystery to the mainstream public how Web sites are listed at
the top of search engine results. There are many theories of
how search engines and search engine optimization (SEO)
initially began.

The 1990s
Alan Emtage, a student at the University of McGill, created
the first “search” program in 1990 called Archie (still in
use today), to archive Web documents. The following year,
Gopher started at the University of Minnesota, and this is
when the concept of search engines began. In 1993, Matthew
Gray created the World Wide Web Wanderer, the earliest known
search engine robot that assists with ranking Web sites. But
search engines as we use them today were born in 1994. In
that same year, Galaxy, Lycos and Yahoo! were all started,
two of which are still widely popular search engines today.

Yahoo! was among the first to implement SEO techniques, even
though at the time they were unaware of the potential growth
the industry would soon have at the turn of the century.
Yahoo! Founders David Filo and Jerry Yang were trying to get
their site seen by others on the Internet by giving it more
exposure. Some excellent structure and tricky hand-coding,
their site became more available for new visitors. They were
not questioned about ethical business practices because
nobody was sure what was considered ethical or unethical –
there were simply no standards in place yet.

As the initial search engines were cataloging the early
Internet, many business owners soon learned to appreciate
the value of their Web site being listed in the search
engines, as they first saw increases in visitors to their
Web sites. They began submitting their URLs on a continuous
basis, and changed their sites to support the needs of
search engine robots. SEO companies started showing up, when
they began experimenting with the concept of search engine
optimization, with the emphasis initially on the submission
process alone. Soon afterwards, the first automatic
submission software was released, and it was then the notion
of Spam came into existence.

The 2000s
SEO professionals have been seen in a negative light over
the last five years, due in part because in early 2001,
enthusiastic webmasters quickly realized they could
overwhelm search engine result pages by over submitting Web
sites. Unfortunately, as the Internet industry developed,
search engines quickly became cautious of new SEO companies
attempting to generate visitors for their clients at any
cost, however unfair or unethical. Tactics such as keyword
spamming, doorway pages, cloaking, and hidden white text
placed on white backgrounds proved too much for the search
engines to tolerate. As a result, the search engines replied
with numerous countermeasures, created to filter out any
techniques considered spam. That is good news, although it
forced ethical SEO companies to start using more subtle
techniques to assist their clients Web sites with obtaining
rankings in the engines.

The “big 3” search engines, Google, MSN and Yahoo!, have
recently come to the realization that SEO as an industry is
here to stay, and to maintain effective results, they needed
to accept the industry, even embrace it, and engines
eventually partnered with successful, ethical SEO companies
to establish typical standards for fair and ethical
optimization. This is important to help keep information
relevant and beneficial to visitors while still being
unbiased to people who create the content on their Web sites.

The Current State of SEO
Today, there are major differences in how search engines
work and how to get ranked in them. With the assistance of
proper search engine optimization, Web sites can now have a
equal fighting chance of obtaining high rankings. Because
SEO is a highly specialized trade that requires both
technical skills and business marketing knowledge, it is
only through the combination of these two skills that one
can properly implement SEO techniques to obtain high search
engine rankings. Many SEO specialists have since now
realized it is “search engines or bust.”

About the Author:
Wendy Suto is president and CEO of Search Circus, a Website
promotion company, offering natural search engine
optimization, blog marketing, link building, Web site
copywriting and article marketing strategies. As a certified
search engine optimization consultant, she teaches SEO
seminars throughout Cleveland, Ohio.
wendy@searchcircus.com

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