A Brief History on When SEO Was Invented
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has become one of the most important tools for businesses to generate leads, boost visibility, and improve conversions. The higher you rank in search engine results, the more visibility your website will achieve, helping you achieve your online goals.
Let's start at the beginning before delving into when SEO was invented. SEO is a number of techniques and tactics that are used to help your website improve ranking and visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). Using a SEO strategy, following Google's best practices, it focuses on making your website search engine friendly and user friendly.
The process helps Google, and other top search engines, understand what your website is about and its relevance to certain user searches. It involves the optimisation of content, user experience, and structure, helping to improve your ranking and improve visibility.
SEO has been traced back to before 1991. This is when Tim Berners-Lee introduced WWW (World Wide Web). It was a new era in information exchange and human communication. The internet was taking shape, though search engines that we know today, had not been discovered yet.
At this time, the internet was used for research and academic purposes, with very few websites.
In 1990, Archie was introduced. Archie was one of the earliest search engines, created at the McGill University in Montreal. Archie was a tool for indexing files on FTP servers. It did not crawl and index web pages, as Google and the other top search engines do today.
Archie was not what we know as a search engine, but it was responsible for laying the foundation for SEO. It allowed users to search for files, retrieve information, and was valuable at organising and cataloguing content.
WebCrawler was introduced in 1994 by a student at the University of Washington. This was a major milestone in search engine optimisation. This was the first search engine that accommodated a full text search. WebCralwer searched for words within web pages, unlike Archie, which only focused on the indexing of files.
WebCrawler was a major innovator in SEO with search capabilities that enabled users to find the information that they were looking for on the internet. It crawled websites and built an index of web pages. Users used keywords to find relevant websites.
WebCrawler became the most used search engine in those days, inspiring the development of other search engines, including AltaVista and Lycos.
Google was introduced in the 1990s, a major milestone in when SEO was invented. Google has become th3e dominant search engine of choice and holds onto more than eighty three percent of the market share today. Google changed the quality of information that users received when using its search engine. Introducing PageRank in 1998, this algorithm provided users with accurate results.
Over ten years, the internet grew exponentially. Website owners were looking for ways to improve their ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs), ensuring that they attracted organic traffic. This resulted in the introduction of SEO and keyword research.
Digital marketers soon found that when they incorporated relevant keywords in their content, they could improve their ranking by aligning their sites to user queries. At this point, keyword optimisation became a valuable part of any SEO strategy with marketers searching for high traffic keywords for their content.
In the mid 2000s, search engines placed importance on link building as a ranking factor. Google was the main player in this. Backlinks from different websites pointing to a page on your website, was proven to boost credibility and trustworthiness, the same as it does today.
Backlinking became an essential part of effective SEO strategies, providing valuable and shareable content.
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