Search engine optimization or SEO has been used strategically by thousands of individuals and companies all over the world to generate higher revenues. It is also one of the cheapest ways to continually advertise your web site and get a lot of targeted traffic who are truly interested in your services and products. It is important that you learn more about its history first to determine the right approaches that will appeal to your target market.

How It All Started

Web site content writers and webmasters started to optimize web sites for search engines during the middle part of the 1990s, since the initial search engines were still cataloging the early Web. In the beginning, a webmaster can submit the web page address or URL to different search engines that will send a spider to navigate and crawl the given page. The spider will gather links to other pages from the page and return the information located on the page to be indexed.

The entire process involves a search engine spider that will download a page and store it on the very own server of the search engine. The second program or indexer, will gather different information regarding the page, like words in the content and location, together with the weight for given words and all other links contained in the page, to be placed in a scheduler for later crawling.

Increased Value

Web site owners understood what it means to increase the ranking of their web sites and being visible to their target market through search engine results. They can then create the opportunity for SEO practitioners using either black hat or white hat. Danny Sullivan, an analyst of the industry in the 1990s, indicated that SEO or search engine optimization may have been coined and used frequently in 1997.

Early versions of the search algorithms heavily depended on information given by the webmaster like the keyword meta tag or index files in search engines such as ALIWEB. Meta tags function by giving a guide to every content of web pages. The Meta data can be used to index pages that were found to be unreliable due to the choices made by the webmaster in the given keywords. It can become an inaccurate representation of the web site’s true content. Inaccurate and inconsistent meta tags can change the rankings of various pages.

Keyword Density

Keyword density was incorporated very much during the early parts of SEO. Search engines would usually suffer because of ranking manipulation of overuse of given keywords. Search engines needed to adjust to make sure that results pages will only present the most useful web sites, instead of unrelated web pages that only had several keywords, but really did not mean anything. More complex ranking algorithms were created and developed by search engines to ensure that visitors only got the most useful results possible.

Modern Results

At present, rankings in search engines are very accurate and dependable. In 2004, search engines have used different factors in the algorithms of rankings to significantly minimize link manipulation. Some of the best search engines use more than 200 various signals. The algorithms are not disclosed by the biggest engines to prevent unscrupulous webmasters from manipulating the results. Some of the best SEOs have used various approaches, with different techniques and opinions posted in blogs and online forums.

For more detailed information on search engine optimization and how it can make your business grow, visit Search Engine Optimization