SEO: How it all started?

These days, anybody who knows what is Google can tell you something about SEO or search engine optimization. It can be defined as a method of increasing the volume and quality of traffic to a website through search engines. In simple words, it is a collection of either organic or algorithm-based techniques to make more visitors curious about your product or services that you are offering online. Here, we plan to take a short tour of the history of SEO to better understand the reason behind the tremendous growth and popularity of the applications.

Internet is all about information. It all started in the year 1990 when a student of University of McGill, Alan Emtage, created a true search facility, Archie, with the exclusive purpose of archiving documents available on the Internet. The next year saw the first seed of development of search engine with Gopher that was created at the University of Minnesota. In 1993, Matthew Gray came out with World Wide Web Wanderer. In 1994, Galaxy, Lycos, and Yahoo, joined hands to form the basic structure of search engine, which remotely resembled the form we see today.

The concepts of optimization started taking place at the same time. The whole process started making big leaps with the introduction of automated submission software packages. It is surprising and amazing to notice that the concept of spam also generated at the same time, as people quickly realized the future potential of this medium. And, just like the thrillers, search engines also started formulating strategies to prevent webmasters from taking unethical means to earn the much coveted page rank.

The struggle is still going on. Like a thrilling game of chess, websites exploiting search engine rules and logic to earn better ranking and, realizing their moves, the search engines changing their methodologies and algorithms.

With the arrival of Google in 1997, the scenario changed dramatically. They started with an overwhelming 25million URLs to clearly indicate that they have the future with them. They are the Internet czars. With their dynamic and futuristic moves, they have turned other search engines almost insignificant. People now refer Internet as Google and vice versa.

It is now the age of link directories, which have lots of resources at one place. The largest of them is DMOZ or Open Directory Project. It contains about five million resources. But, Google database has almost eight billion documents! Everyday, some new words are being coined. The vocabulary is getting enriched with new words like spider, crawler, indexer, and many more.

We have now come a long way from simple keyword seasoning or density and location to the sophisticated techniques of linking, digging, and so on. According to industry experts, what we are experiencing today is just the tip of the iceberg! There’s more explosion to come. Let’s wait and watch for the surge to make the best of it.

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