A Comprehensive History Of One Of The Most Competitive Marketing Strategies Today

With more and more people relying on the organic internet search results for their regular dose of information, you simply cannot deny the part played by Search Engine Optimization (SEO) towards a new era of internet marketing.

A website in itself is so powerful a medium that it is not sidelined as a mere tool. Just by tweaking certain aspects of your website, you could bring about a huge leap in your search engine results pages (SERPs) ranking. Nobody had ever imagined the role spiders were to play in our daily business chores. Who would have thought about the revolution SEO would bring to the internet world during the former's initiation?

SEO may be a whole new term for you, but it is not a relatively new phenomenon. The first signs of SEO could be traced back to the 1990s. During the early years of the decade, the number of websites on the internet started piling up. Experts, entrepreneurs, and consumers alike started to feel the need of organizing them. Alphabetical structuring was first implemented. But site owners began complaining about the unjust visibility of other poor websites simply because of their alphabetical order. Thus, keyword density came into the picture, followed by gradual inclusion of many other factors that make up SEO, as we know of it today.

Early in 1995, Yahoo was apparently the only search engine in the market. If you didn't have your website registered on Yahoo, you didn't have a website at all. Alphabetical sorting was predominant back then. Keyword density and seasoning emerged about a year later, in 1996. They were followed by newer methods and algorithms as the year progressed. The strategies used back then were altogether different from what we use today.

Though Google was launched in 1998, it did not gain worldwide recognition until the dawn of the new millennium. Till the 2000s, spamming had become a common sight among internet users. Google Page Rank (PR) system and other advanced algorithms tackled spamming for good. The Google algorithms were so successful as to force the then search engine giant, Yahoo, to ditch AltaVista and embrace the emerging competitor's algorithms. Needless to say, Google revolutionized the face of SEO in just a couple of years of its initiation. It was Google who implanted the seed of the SEO we know today. Google took the battle between search engines and optimizers to a whole new level.

Google's bots or 'crawlers' aided it well to scan web pages for keyword density, the number of backlinks and other aspects. SEOs tried to one-up Google to the best of their abilities, but the latter's irregular updates, most notably the Caffeine algorithm in 2009, the Panda algorithm in 2011, and the Penguin algorithm in 2012, effectively tackled any hurdles that were put up.

The advent and the rapid popularity of social media in the internet market posed more problems for Google and other search engines. Today, the content, the keyword density, the backlink count, and other technical aspects of the website alone cannot determine the PR or the SERP rank of the website. Search engines also take into account the social recognition of the website or blog. The social status today matters about half a percentage more than the backlinks!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays an important role in the new era of internet marketing. Along with SEO, a business can also make use of various online advertising techniques to gain popularity and attract prospective customers. Click here to know more.