When Did SEO Become Popular? The Exciting History of Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a process that improves your online presence with a user-friendly, accessible, and easy to navigate website that provides search engines and users with the information that they need. Search engines need certain information to crawl, index, and rank your web pages, while visitors can use information you provide as part of their purchasing decision. Hopefully improving your conversion rates by becoming a loyal customer.
The aim of SEO is to boost your brand visibility online, improving your ranking in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), driving organic traffic to your website, and improving conversion rates. This is done following an effective strategy of keyword research, on-page optimising, off-page optimisation, and technical SEO.
These days, SEO is an imperative part of digital marketing. More people are using the internet to make purchases, book services, and find information. As a result, businesses need an online presence to remain visible and drive traffic to their websites. This means ensuring that the website is discoverable and visible, needing an effective SEO strategy.
With competition continuing to grow online, businesses need to constantly product high quality and fresh content, providing value to their audience. This way you are able to improve your ranking in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), read your audience, and drive quality traffic to your website, helping you stay that step ahead of your competition.
When the internet was first introduced, search engines were not far behind. The search algorithms were very simple, focusing on keywords, matching they against web pages. As the internet has evolved, so has SEO. It has become more complex, relying on numerous optimisation tactics and techniques to improve your ranking in SERPs.
Keyword stuffing was a popular way to gain visibility online in the early 2000s. Businesses would find what keywords their potential clients were using and then filling their content with those keywords. The problem arose when visitors found that the information they found did not meet their search criteria. As a result, Google and the other search engines, started introducing more algorithms and updating their existing algorithms, ensuring that the content they present to their users is high quality and relevant.
This pushed for the need for high quality and unique content. This was the start of content marketing, that we know today. Social media has also make tremendous changes to SEO, providing a new way for businesses to reach their audience and drive quality traffic to their websites.
SEO will continue to evolve for decades to come. As new technologies are introduced, SEO keeps changing. Common SEO techniques today include focusing SEO efforts on mobile optimisation, voice search, and AI.
SEO can be traced back to the 1990s, when the first search engines were introduced. While the internet was still new, users relied on directories to find the information that they were looking for. As the internet has evolved, the number of published websites has sky-rocketed. In fact, there are more than 1.09 billion websites on the internet today. Search engines had to evolve to find effective ways to retrieve, index, and rank all the websites web pages.
With search engines becoming more sophisticated, businesses have seen the need to rank well in SERPs. A high ranking offers excellent benefits, improving brand awareness, driving quality traffic to your website, and helping to improve conversion rates. As a result, businesses today cannot ignore the importance of an effective SEO strategy, over thirty years after SEO first became popular.
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