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 concept can be traced back to the mid’90s and the early search engines like Alta Vista. During those early days one could indeed easily get your website to rank high in search results simply by adding the ‘right’ title tag, description tag and keywords to the HTML of the website. Content did not play a major role.
Those days are long gone. Search engines quickly caught on that their search results were being manipulated by web designers and they changed the algorithm (formula) they used to determine a page’s ranking.
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 published a series of guidelines for webmasters – called Google webmaster guidelines. In this they explain the principles of good website design, high quality content that is relevant to the search terms, good layout practices and other factors that could influence a website’s ranking with Google.
Search engine optimization has therefore evolved from simple techniques such as keyword manipulation and buying incoming links to where it should be – focusing on quality. Not only quality and relevance of content, but also quality in layout and error-free HTML
Thanks to some key tips from the big 3 in search engine technology, a new craze called search engine optimization has struck the internet. Businesses who want to get themselves noticed have turned to seo for help getting ahead. Find out more, now.
