History Of Search Engine Optimisation(SEO).

By the mid-90s, webmasters had begun to optimise their sites for search

engines due to a growing awareness of the importance of being listed by the

various engines. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit the URL

of a web page for it to be indexed. Search engines relied on the metadata,

information that webmasters inserted in the code of a web page, to determine

what a web page was about and to index it appropriately.

Industry analyst Danny Sullivan records that the earliest known use of the

term “search engine optimisation” was a spam message posted on Usenet, an

online forum or message board, on July 26, 1997.

Realising the importance of being ranked highly in search results, webmasters

began using the search engine’s reliance on metadata to manipulate the ranking

for their websites. To combat this, search engines in turn have developed more

complex algorithms including a number of other ranking factors.

While at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a search

engine, called Backrub, which relied on a mathematical algorithm to rank

web pages. They founded Google in 1998, which relied on PageRank, hyperlink

analysis as well as on-page factors to determine the prominence of a web

page. This enabled Google to avoid the same kind of manipulation of on-page

factors to determine ranking.

PageRank was based on the practice of academic citations. The more times

an academic paper is cited, the more likely it is to be considered an authority

paper on the subject. Page and Brin used a similar theory for their search

engine – the more times a web page or website is linked to, the more likely it is

that the community considers that page an authority.

However, ranking highly in search results is vital to websites, so webmasters

have adapted their websites as search engines have updated their algorithms

to avoid being “gamed”. Today, Google says it uses more than 200 different

factors in its algorithm to determine relevance and ranking. None of the major

search engines disclose the elements they use to rank pages, but there are

many SEO practitioners who spend time analysing patent applications to try to

determine what these are.

In 2007, Google released a major change to its search engine results pages.

Along with other search engines such as Bing, Google now serves media such

as images and video in search results. In addition, realtime results are served

for rapidly changing events, while news and social results are also displayed

in the search engine results pages. In 2010, both Bing and Google announced

that social signals are used in ranking search results.