SEO began in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Many site owners quickly learned to appreciate the value of a new listing in a search engine, as they observed sharp spikes in traffic to their sites.
Site owners soon began submitting their site URLs to the engines on a regular basis, and began modifying their site to accommodate the needs of search engine spiders, the software programs sent out to explore the Web. Special features such as meta tags became a common feature of sites that sought out high-ranking listings in search engine result pages (the so-called "SERPs").
As the industry developed, search engines quickly became wary of unscrupulous SEO firms that attempted to generate traffic for their customers at any cost (the most common problem being search results' decreasing relevance). One frequent practice, called keyword spamming, involved the insertion of random text at the bottom of a webpage, colored to match the background of the page. The inserted text usually included words that were frequently searched (such as sex), with the goal of getting rankings, and thus access to large streams of traffic. The search engines responded with a continuous series of countermeasures, designed to filter out the "noise" generated by these artificial techniques. In turn, several SEO firms developed ever-more-subtle techniques to influence rankings.
In the early 2000s, search engines and SEO firms attempted to establish an unofficial truce. There are several tiers of SEO firms, and the most reputable companies employ content-based optimizations which meet with the search engines' (reluctant) approval. These techniques include improvements to site navigation and copywriting, designed to make websites more intelligible to search engine algorithms.
To obtain maximum search engine visibility, it is essential to understand how the target audience is searching for actual information on a web site. When the target audience uses a search engine to find products and services, they type a set of words or phrases into the search box. This set of words is commonly called targeted keywords or phrases.
For the target audience to find a site on the search engines, the page must contain keyword phrases that match the phrases the target audience is typing into search queries.
When a search engine spider analyzes a web page, it determines keyword relevancy based on an algorithm, which is a formula that calculates how web pages are ranked. The most important text for a search engine is the most important text for the target audience - the text your target audience is going to read when they arrive at your web site.
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| A search engine is a program designed
to help find information stored on a computer system such as the
World Wide Web, or a personal computer. The search engine
allows one to ask for content meeting specific criteria (typically
those containing a given word or phrase) and retrieving a list of
references that match those criteria. Search engines use regularly
updated indexes to operate quickly and efficiently.
Google and most other web engines utilize not only PageRank
but more than 150 criteria to determine relevancy. The
algorithm "remembers" where it has been and indexes the
number of cross-links and relates these into groupings. PageRank
is based on citation analysis that was developed in the 1950s by
Dr. Eugene Garfield at the University of Pennsylvania. |