History and Evolution of Search Engine Optimization or SEO

HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF SEO

Ever wondered how Google or other search engines rank your websites within your searches?

Or how content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers more relevant to the users? 

This opens the door to the concept of Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

What is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.

                 

Google has a crawler that goes out and gathers information about all the content they can find on the Internet. The crawlers then build an index based on the collected data. The index is then fed through an algorithm that tries to match all that data with your query. 

History of SEO

For getting a better understanding of the history of SEO, It is important to have a brief idea about the history of Google.

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Standford University in California. 

After the World Trade Centre attack, more people started using Google to search for it. However, Google could not give satisfying results to its users. In its initial days, Google was not a real-time search engine. It could not give instant results to the users, instead, the result was sent to the user's email id within 24 hours. The officials in Google arranged a meeting to discuss this issue.

They decided to make Google crawlable so that fresh and new edited content can be added to the index of google making the search results wider.  

GoogleBot is Google's robot that visits the sites and looks for updated content. This helps in ranking the sites in the SERP.

 

 

   

Google published SEO starter guide for webmasters and demanded them to start practicing it.

Google allowed web crawlers to crawl the database by optimizing it. This is where SEO emerges.

Evolution of SEO

The key objective of Google at that time was to ensure that search-engine technology focused on providing quality results to the users. Google had issued guidelines for creating quality content. 

PageRank of a website was measured on the basis of the occurrence of the keywords. 

This resulted in Keyword stuffing by the Webmasters which is a 'Black-hat' SEO technique. This called for an update on the working feature of Google. 

Google was then made link specific i.e. PageRank of a website was measured on the basis of inbound links. The higher the number of inbound links the websites had, the better would be its PageRank. 

Google also provided a toolbar on Internet Explorer for webmasters to check the PageRank effectively.

This started to affect the quality of the search engine since webmasters tried to get inbound links from other sites by getting them paid.

To deal with this issue Google made it quality link specific .i.e. inbound links from highly ranked sites were given more ranking. 

Google Adwords has also begun during this time and you could see paid results alongside organic search results. At this time link quality was not measured. Webmasters were not really following a 'White hat' way to get rankings as suggested by Google. 

It is then that Google started off with its algorithm updates.

 Google made an update in 2003.

•  This year many sites lost their search engine rankings.

•  The sites that did keyword stuffing got penalized.

•  Google acquired blogger.com and created the blog monetizing platform Adsense.

•  Many blogs that created poor quality content used Adsense to monetize and quick money.

In the year 2009, Google made itself more interactive with users.

•  If users spent a good time on a website and do inquiries, likes, comments, or any other activities Google considers it as the users preferred site, and such websites are ranked higher in the search result listings. 

• Google  initialized personalized search by utilizing searcher history and preferences.

The year 2010 was a year of enlightenment to the evolution of SEO.

•  It was a generation of growing social media that could influence the visibility of the content.

• Google Plus was born along with a +1button, both of which played a significant factor in boosting content visibility.

• Content that was shared throughout the web and social media created valuable backlinks and engagement that built authority.