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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): How And When Did SEO Begin? by dany

Needless to say that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become a major web practice and driving force behind any online business and website growth, success and profitability. But how and when SEO was introduced, what where the very first search engines, what are the parts of a search engine and how search engines actually work? For a better understanding of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), let us take a closer look at SEO background.

What is a search engine

Search engine is the term that refers to the software (i.e. computer program) that allows internet users find and access information from online resources through certain keywords and searches defined by the user. Search engines use a software robot that seeks out websites and gets them indexed. Search engines operate algorithmically.

Search engines consist of web crawlers (also referred to as web robots or web spiders), a computer program which follows links on the web to discover web pages that are not yet indexed or have been updated since they were last indexed. When these web pages are discovered, they are analyzed to determine how it should be indexed and should be actually indexed or not. The info is extracted from meta tags, the titles, headings, etc. Then the web pages go to the search engine index and get stored in the database for use in relevant queries. Thus, when user requests for certain info on the web, the search engine index allows the roughly relevant information to be found.

When the web user enters a query (which consists of keywords and phrases) into a search engine, search engines typically do the following:

• Accept the user query and analyze criteria defined by the user
• Check if the user request is misspelled and recommend popular spellings
• Gather relevant and best-matching web pages
• Request relevant web ads to display near search results
• Display the results based the user criteria and keywords

Search engine first offers the best-matching results. Among the factors that search engine takes into account when determining which pages match best, there are page content, keyword relevance and usage, external and internal  linking, and many other.

How did SEO rise to power and what are first search engines

The evolution of the search engine technology was rather quick. The first search engine appeared in the 1990s.

The pioneer of the industry was Archie, created in 1990 by Alan Emtage. First web robot WWW Wanderer was developed in 1993 by Matthew Gray. Then came into use World Wide Web Worm, Repository-Based Software Engineering (RBSE) spider, JumpStation, WebCrawler, Excite, Lycos, InfoSeek, Alta Vista, Yahoo (founded in 1994), MSN (1998), etc.

BackRub, the system that checked backlinks to estimate the prominence and importance of a website, was introduced in 1996 by Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who later founded Google and developed PageRank algorithm. Before Google, search engines ranked websites by the number of times the search term appeared on the webpage. The domain google.com was registered in 1997, and Google Corporation was first incorporated as a private company in 1998, with its initial public offering in 2004.

Currently, Google company is located in Mountain View, California. Google’s offices are referred to as Googleplex. According to Experian Hitwise latest research, today Google is the king of search engine market. Google received 72.17 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending May 29, 2010. Yahoo! Search has 14.43%, Bing has 9.23 percent and Ask received 2.14 percent. Just take a look at U.S. searches, merely for informational purposes.

Percentage of U.S. searches among leading search engine providers

www.google.com
April 2010: 71.40%
May 2010: 72.17%

search.yahoo.com
April 2010: 14.96%
May 2010: 14.43%

www.bing.com*
April 2010: 9.43%
May 2010: 9.23%

www.ask.com
April 2010: 2.18%
May 2010: 2.14%

Note: Data is based on four-week rolling periods (ending May 1, 2010, and May 29, 2010) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. Figures are for Web searches only.*This includes executed searches on Bing.com but does not include searches on Club.Live.com.

Initially, SEO consisted of submitting the websites to search engines which would send a web spider to crawl that webpage, extract links, and get the webpage information indexed. The term “Search Engine Optimization” came into use when website owners recognized the value of having their sites prominent in the results of leading search engines.

Modern Search Engine Optimization is different. SEO practitioners introduced various SEO techniques, and professional SEO services are in high demand. Search engines will keep becoming smarter, while SEO will keep being one of the dominant web practices on the web.