The History Of SEO And Its Usefulness Today
SEO or search engine optimization refers to the technique of increasing the appearance of a website in search results on popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo. The process involves marketing research to discover popular keywords that potential viewers may type into the search bar to find a particular website. Based on these discoveries the website can be modified to include the found keywords to help improve its appearance in search engines.
The process first began being used in the mid 1990s. In its archaic form at the time all that had to be done was submitting the address of a website to the available search engines. After being submitted the search engine would send bots known as spiders or web crawlers to gather various information on the page to be used to indexing.
These early versions of optimization required information from the webmaster such as the keyword meta tag. Because of the control the webmaster has over this, unethical attempts increase search engine appearance were made by making use of inaccurate tags and keywords. This unethical use of the process is known as black hat SEO.
The Black Hat method may make use of hidden pages and text that is consisting of highly concentrated keywords. Search engines have a challenging time to locate websites making use of these tactics, but encourage other webmasters to seek out and report websites that are. Those websites that do follow the guidelines and use SEO ethically are using the White Hat method. The easiest way to follow the White Hat method is to always use relevant keywords. Those that do not follow through with White Hat may risk having their website banned from being displayed in search results.
Search engines at this early time would have somewhat of a struggle dealing with webmasters having almost complete control over their appearance in search results. This was because the algorithms at the time were too simple and being based mostly on keyword density. With the use of Black Hat methods, a webmaster could easily bring his search ranking up. Taking this into account, search engines began creating much more complex algorithms. These would involve several other factors that webmasters would not have as much control over.
By 2004 search engines had reached a point where this manipulation was kept to a minimum. Google claims to rank sites in their search engine based on over 200 different signals. They also have not released the algorithms that are used by them to go about ranking websites. This also goes for other popular search engines such as Yahoo and Bing. In order to effectively use SEO under these conditions, extra research must be done. Many practitioners have been known to study patents held by companies like Google or Yahoo to attempt to get an understanding of the methods they use.
Google, having a desire to provide user friendliness to their customers wanted to do away the archaic methods of ranking websites. In 2005 they started making use of personalized search results for individual users. Based on your previous searches and website visits, Google would create a unique set of search results catered for you. To further increase user friendliness, in 2009 Google would introduce their new real-time-search feature. This would begin displaying search results as the user was typing and update in real time. Google at this time was also using the web history of its users to populate these search results.
SEO is something that webmasters still can make use of despite the unknown algorithms being used. Many practitioners are well informed have done a lot of research to help clients improve their appearance in search engines. These practitioners can also help webmasters to discover if a clients website is following the required guidelines.
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