What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Prior to the development of search engines, the Internet was a collection of File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites which users navigated to find specific shared files. With the growth of central list of web servers joining the internet, the world wide web became the interface choice for accessing the internet. With this, the need for finding and organizing data on FTP web servers also grew giving birth to the first search engines.

The primary purpose that the search engines serve is to find and organize distributed data found on the Internet. The year of the advent of search engine was 1990 when Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal, created Archie. It sparked a revolution on the internet and many new and improved search engines followed in the shape of searchable database of websites. While both web directories and search engines gained popularity in the 1990s, search engines developed a life of their own becoming the preferred method of Internet search. For example, the major search engines found in use today originated in development between 1993 and 1998.

Here’s a brief chronology of the search engine development: 1993 – Excite, Yahoo!, WebCrawler!, Lycos, Infoseek; 1995 – Altavista; 1997 –Ask Jeeves (now Ask); 1997 – Google; 1998 – MSN; 1998 – Overture; 1999 – Alltheweb

It was also in 1994 that companies began experimenting with the concept of search engine optimisation; with the early emphasis begin solely on the submission process. However, within 12 months, the first automated submission software packages were released, and shortly afterwards the concept of spam reared its head for the first time, as eager webmasters quickly realised that (at this time) they could swamp search results pages by over-submission. Search engines soon realised this, and spammers began in earnest.

Soon, optimisers and search engines developed a "cat and mouse" relationship. As many web site optimisers discover new ranking techniques, the engines subsequently revise and enhance their ranking algorithms to respond to these strategies. Often this struggle is catalysed by a small portion of submitters abusing accepted practices in an unethical manner, and those SEO companies that know what they are doing are forced into two camps, those that work with the search engines to achieve rankings and thereby quality traffic, and those that work against the search engines to achieve high quantities of low-quality traffic.

The search engines quickly noted that SEO as an industry was here to stay, and in order to maintain useful indexes, they would need to at least accept the industry, if not embrace it, and soon many search engines were allowing proven ethical SEO companies to become partner sites.