While many tech-savvy people have at least a basic idea of what SEO is and accept it as an integral part of a business, we don't spend a lot of time thinking about its origins. So, where did SEO begin, and how did it become so valuable to marketers and brands?
If you’re looking to learn more about SEO, you’ll love the Seotribunal's timeline below.
The first idea for creating a universal archive for the entire world’s data came about in 1945. By 1994, Alta Vista, Infoseek, Lycos, and Yahoo search engines were launched. Soon after, Ask.com started ranking links according to their popularity levels.
In 1997, Google, MSN, and Yandex joined the train. With search engines gaining more traction and more people getting connected to the Internet, finding information became less stressful. Finding the relevant and high quality information, however, still posed a serious problem.
That problem was solved when PageRank, the technology that Google uses to help rank search results based on quality, was introduced, and by the early 2000s Google had begun a takeover. These days, it has 92.5% of the mobile market share and 72.3% of the desktop market share.
By 2010, marketers began to see the growing importance of social media content in SEO, so both Google and Bing added ‘social signals,’ which would show any written Facebook posts that matched a person’s search.
In 2011, an algorithm update called Panda was released to compensate superior websites and reduce the presence of subpar sites in Google’s organic search engine results. This update was followed by Google Penguin which was another way to reward top-notch websites.
But, the most significant SEO announcement might have been Google’s mobile update of April 2015 - this update caused non-mobile-friendly websites to get lower rankings. This new update was a sign that SEO ranking had become based on content and keywords. In 2016, RankBrain, which tweaks the algorithm on its own to find the best page for a given query, was introduced.
As mobile usage is on the increase – 58% of online searches are carried out that way, as opposed to the 40% on the desktop – it makes sense that SEO will continue working in that direction.
Furthermore on SEO trends- According to Google, 20% of searches are from voice commands. And due to Google’s innovative algorithm, voice queries return very relevant and somewhat personal search results in a timely fashion. This is as a result of user information already gathered like the users location and his/her past queries. With this, the use of voice search can only continue to rise and hence the adaptation of SEO to suit this will continue to follow.
Check out the infographic below for more details about the history, growth, and trends of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
