Search Engine Optimization - A Short Background History
Search engine optimization involves modifying the HTML, layout and content of a website in such a way that it gets more visitors from search engines for a particular search term. There are many ‘experts’ who claim to be able to do just that.
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.
Search engines soon realized that the mere concept of a website owner being able to manipulate the ranking of his own website in search results meant bad business. They therefore introduced new formulas to rank websites in search results. Often they kept these formulas, or algorithms secret.
Theoretically the number of other websites linking to a particular website should be an indication of its importance. Inktomi is an example of one of the early search engines that used this principle to rank websites. Google soon after developed their own patented system whereby they didn’t only count incoming links to a website, but also rated those links in terms of various factors - so not all links were equal.
Web developers responded by setting up link pages, link farms and paid links sites where you could buy as many incoming links to your website as you want. Many of those still exist today. The debasement of the system continued when many blogs and forums allowed website owners to link back to their own websites when they posted comments on one of these sites.
As a result many forums and blogs currently use the nofollow tag for links in the text of blog and forum entries. This tag should not normally have a negative effect on search rankings, it just won’t count to increase a website’s search ranking.
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.
Thanks to some key tips from the top dog search machines, a new marketing strategy search engine optimization has spread like wildfire. Businesses who want to get themselves noticed have turned to seo to turn things around. Find out more, now.
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