Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a process of increasing the visibility of websites in search engines. A plethora of techniques are employed to tune-up a site so that it appears SEO-friendly. Creation of quality and unique content on site, use of appropriate keywords in the web content and building of links with others sites are some of the key techniques of gaining higher ranking on search engines.
The inception of SEO
SEO as a concept and an ingenious internet marketing strategy began to gain popularity in the mid-1990s following the launch of a number of web search engines. The entire process of getting a site indexed was simple. All that a site owner needed to do was submit the address of his site’s page to various search engines. Search engines, then would go on to crawl the page, extract links to other pages from it and get it indexed.
With search engines becoming popular among internet users, site owners realized the importance of getting their sites ranked higher in search engine results. Thus, the rate to lag behind one another got kicked off among websites and the business of Search Engine Optimization took to full swing.
The phrase Search Engine Optimization was first used by a US based web site owner John Audette in 1997.
Early versions of search engines depended heavily on factors like use of keywords in the Meta tag of a site’s page and density of keywords in the web page. This process was flawed as website’s choice of keywords in Meta tag and the presence of keywords in the page would often not give an honest idea about its actual content.
Faced with criticism, search engines adapted their page-indexing techniques so that their result pages would show only the most relevant pages.
A landmark in the history of SEO came in 1998 when Google was launched. Google, with its large pool of information, attracted everyone in the world. Within couple of years, Google developed as the leading search engine kicking off a fierce competition among million of websites to get higher ranking on it.