A Brief Introduction to Search Engine Optimization
In the early to mid 1990s, as the Web started down the path of commercialism, the first of many 'search engines' appeared to help users find sites and pages quickly. It began in earnest in 1994, with 'Jerry and David's Guide to The Worldwide Web' — renamed 'Yahoo!' a year later (which stood for 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle'. If you were online back then, the names Excite, Galaxy, WebCrawler, Alta Vista, HotBot, Lycos, InfoSeek, Ask Jeeves and Northern Light among others will ring a bell. Google came on the scene in 1998 with a system that ranked pages by advanced mathematical algorithms.
Cops and Robbers
Since the beginning, webmasters looked for ways to manipulate the page ranking processes of the major search engines. Back when 'keywords' where a major determining factor, unscrupulous webmasters would pack pages with desired keywords — even resorting to repeating a word hundreds of times, but assigning the same color of the background to the text. The visitor would not see it, but the 'robots' that scan Web page coding would, resulting in higher rankings. Try this today, and Google™ will ban your domain for life.
All search engines use closely guarded methods to determine how relevant a page is to a search term the user enters. Called 'algorithms', they vary between engines, as something that gets a certain result on Google may not impress Yahoo!™ as much, and visa versa. Microsoft's upstart Bing! has keyed on a set of algorithms that are not as widely used as others.
Again, once the bad guys figure out a way to exploit an algorithm, the good guys make adjustments and the game continues — but sometimes these adjustments can affect existing page rankings for everybody. In 2010 alone, Goggle made over 500 tweaks to their algorithms. Most were minor, but there is always the possibility that a major change could have significant effects on overall rankings. You could wake up one morning to discover that your site that was on page 1 the night before is now on page 18. If that's an online store that needs a steady supply of new customers, you're in trouble.
A Constantly Evolving Landscape
As high visibility on search results pages is now a desired goal in any serious marketing plan, the competition grows ever intense. To rank high — and stay there is no easy task for most businesses. The methods that get you there are in constant flux, while new technologies what also sway the outcome (social media, for example) are constantly emerging as well.
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