History of Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is a process of improving a website to get it crawled and listed properly in search engines. This process of optimizing a website is commonly termed as SEO.

When a user types in a term to search it in search engines, search engines display a number of results. All these results match the search term and these terms are known as keywords. Search engine optimization is used to research and identify these keywords for a specific website. These keywords are then used in descriptive sentences within the website so that when a search engine crawler, crawls the website, it takes notice of these keywords and list the website in search results for that very keyword.

History of SEO

In mid 90s, when search engines were emerging and internet users had started to use them for collecting information, some webmasters realized the power of a search engine. These webmasters knew that in future, search engines will be the most widely used internet applications and they started to study the algorithms these search engines were adopting.

Search engines at that time were mostly relying over the information provided to them by a webmaster. The process involved was; a webmaster had to submit his website to a search engine. In addition to the URL of the website, he had to provide the Meta information that included title, description and keywords, of the website. The search engine would then crawl the website and was considered to give a special consideration to the website for the keywords that were submitted.

The search engines had to suffer from ranking manipulation and abuse as they were mostly relying on the information provided by the webmaster. A search engine would be considered a good one only if its user will get the required information from the search term he entered. In this case, many of the webmasters tried to misuse the search engines to generate traffic to their websites. Misuse and abuse of search engines was carried out by providing misleading keywords to the search engine during the website submission. These and other such techniques were termed as Black Hat SEO.

SEO in Current Times

Search engines have developed to a level where not everyone can have a clear understanding of how they work and how and why a website is ranked higher than others for a specific keyword. In current times, search engines have improved very much. Complex mathematical algorithms are used to rank websites in search results.

The leading search engines of the world do not reveal how exactly they rank websites but some known factors are the descriptive Meta tags within the HTML of a web page and its relevancy to the content of that page. A combination of number of links pointing to a website and their quality is also an important factor.

SEO in current times can be defined as a combination of a good and powerful optimization of a website, also termed as on-page optimization, and quality of content relevant links pointing to that website, also termed as off-page optimization.

Search engine optimization has become an integral part of every website these days. Most of the webmasters have an idea about SEO and they usually carry it out by themselves. This effort of in house SEO is mostly for small websites. For relatively large and quality traffic oriented websites, professional SEO services are offered from a number of companies.

SEO is the most important part of an internet marketing campaign. It drives quality and targeted internet traffic to a website. In addition to SEO, webmasters also require advertising campaigns to drive traffic to their website. While calculating the ROI of a website, internet marketing, that combines both, SEO and advertising, turns out to be the most persuading technique and it should be implemented with properly setting up an analytical application to measure the true success of the website.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/
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Waqqas Alvi is a business analyst with special expertise with internet businesses. Search engine optimization and online advertising are the most important tools for a successful internet based business. With an experience of more than six years, Waqqas Alvi is operating SEO LTD as a search engine optimization and online advertising company.