History & Evolution of SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a set of rules for optimizing your website so that it can achieve higher rankings in search engines’ organic results. It’s the process to follow to increase the visibility of your website in search engines and get more traffic.SEO can be considered as a complete framework since the whole process has a number of rules (or guidelines), a number of stages, and a set of controls.

History of SEO

SEO has evolved in parallel with the contributions that the algorithms of its last three decades have been able to provide.That is how initially we come across with classic or rudimentary SEO from the 1990s.Subsequent decades were influenced by the presence of technology and the professionalisation of content creation.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Stanford university developed Google in 1998.Google saw an opportunity to do something that other search engines weren’t.They began working on algorithm updates that would reward quality and relevant content to connect users with what they really want to find out.

On September 11,2001 following the Al-Qaeda attack at the World Trade Centre,people started searching google for the news regarding the same.But google failed to provide the results for the search.This made google nervous since World Trade Centre was the largest building of that time.After the discussion with officials they pointed out that the webpages were not crawlable to google.

There are three basic steps a search engine takes when searching for a content;crawling,caching and indexing.

Crawling is a scanning process by which a program(bots or web crawler)scans a new or updated webpage.After crawling a snapshot of the webpage will be stored in the database based on their categories.This is called Caching.The search results are retrieved by the process of Indexing.

In order to provide guidelines on SEO practice,a 32 page “SEO starter guide” was introduced and it paved a way for better learning and understanding SEO practices.

Evolution of SEO

Initially google was niche specific or content specific.It refers to creating content that help the webpages to rank high in the search engines.Content written for SEO is optimized around a specific keyword.This lead to keyword stuffing which is a black hat SEO technique.Black hat is an unethical practice which is against search engine guidelines.Realizing this google converted niche specific to link specific.In this algorithm number or links will determine the ranking of a website.Each hyperlink will be considered as a recommendation or vote.Website owners began to sell the links and this lead to dispute.

Then a quality link specific algorithm was introduced for ranking where the pages were ranked out of 10.Page rank or trust value of the page were determined based on more than 200 factors considered along with the link.This also made the website owners to sell the link.Hence google discovered a new tactic called passing the juice.If the webmasters with good page rank gives link to other web pages, their ranking will be reduced.Link juice is the term used in SEO to refer the value or equity passed from one page or site to another.Google also introduced a tag “nofollow” to add along with the hyperlink where the equity passing is stopped.

During the period of 2003 to 2008,google gained popularity and growth and entered the field of advertisement.

Google Ads

Google Ads(formerly google AdWords) developed by google that allows advertisers to display their ads on google’s search engine results page.Pay per click is an internet advertising model in which advertiser pays a publisher when the ad is clicked.

Google AdSense 

Google AdSense is a program run by google through which website owners could display the business the advertisement in their websites.

In 2008,google introduced personalized search results and started showing suggestions.In 2009,google began ranking based on the website interaction.Bounce rate is the percentage of all sessions on the site in which users viewed only a single page.Pogo sticking is an SEO term used ti describe the situation where a searcher quickly navigates between the pages in search results.As the bounce rate increases trust value of the webpage on google decreases.

Social Media Signals

By 2010,social media platform like facebook and Orkut gain popularity among internet users.Social medias were considered as a ranking factor of websites.Influential power is determined based on the interaction of the social media pages and it lead to the high ranking of pages.