Search Engine Optimization – A Short Background History

Search engine optimization is an attempt to get more and better quality visitors from search engines for a website without having to pay for it. Of course paying a search engine optimization expert to optimize your website for you, might in the end cost as much, if not more, than paying to have your website included in search results.

The whole concept dates back to the early days of the Internet and search engines. During the good old days of search engines like Alta Vista, it was in fact quite easy to get your website ranked high in search results. All you had to do was ‘feed’ it with the right meta tags. The right keywords, description tag and title tag had a major influence on how high your website was ranked. In those days you could build a website today and have it ranked high in Alta Vista tomorrow.

Those days are no more. Search engines soon realized that if they allowed their search results to be affected by the website owner, who had a vested interest in a high ranking, they would serve results to their visitors that were often irrelevant to what they were looking for. So search engines changed the formulas they used to rank websites to make it more difficult to be manipulated.

One of the very first search engines that used the number of incoming links to a website as a measure of it’s popularity and therefore to determine its ranking in search results, was Inktomi. Google soon followed with a patented system that did not simply count links, but also gave a higher value to some links than others when they ranked websites.

Once again web developers started abusing the system with so-called link farms and link pages where a website owner could simply buy thousands of incoming links to artificially improve the ranking of his website. Link spamming on blogs and forums also contributed to the debasement of the whole system.

This resulted in the development of the nofollow tag. This tag instructs search engine robots not to count such a link in favor of a website when encountered. Theoretically at least it should also not penalize the website linked to. Many forums and blogs now use this tag in links on their pages.

Google, although never making public exactly how they rank search results, have since set up an extensive set of guidelines to help webmasters to get a better search engine ranking by focusing on the things that should really count: quality and relevance of content, quality of design and good HTML coding.

Search engine optimization has therefore moved beyond buying links and trying to manipulate a few HTML tags. The focus has shifted to quality and relevance, where it should have been from the start.

After top search engines released their formulas for success a new craze called search engine optimization has spread like wildfire. Online companies who need a little help boosting sales have turned to seo for help getting ahead. Find out more, now.