HISTORY OF SEO
Search engine is a software that is designed to perform information search in an internet. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the search results in a search engine. One of the most prominent search engine is Google.
The Google was invented by two students as a part of their university project in 1998. First, it was used as a subdomain under their university website in which the search results will be sent to the submitted email id. This process took more than 24 hours time. By 2000, internet was widely used all around the globe. On September 11, 2001 following the Al- Qaeda attack at the World Trade Center in America, people were searching Google for the news regarding the same but the results were disappointing. This made Google restless, since it could not provide the details about the world's largest building of that time. The engineers in the Google pointed out that the problem was that, not all the available web pages were crawlable to Google.
Now, in order to crawl every web page in the internet, the web masters who controls the web pages, must be given guidelines on optimization practice. This rise a concern among the engineers in Google since it belongs to their secret files. But at last with no other solutions left, they published 32 page starter guide document called “SEO Starter Guide”. Thus Search Engine Optimization started.
EVOLUTION OF SEO
In the beginning, Google used niche specific or content specific. The keyword meta tag concept was used in ranking the web pages, where ranking will increase with the occurrence of keywords. This led the webmasters to use Keywords stuffing, a black hat SEO technique (unethical practice) where there is over use of keywords within a web page. Realizing this, Google changed its algorithm to link specific. Here the website that receives more links from any other websites will be ranked accordingly. Each hyperlink will be considered as recommendation vote.
The loophole in this case was that, the website owners started to sell the links to the webmasters who were looking for the same. Then google put forward the quality link specific approach, where pages were ranked out of 10. The ranks referred to the trust value of that web page. Here 200 other factors were also considered along with the links. Then web page owners with high page ranks started to sell the links to the web masters.
Why was Google hesitating to change its algorithms? During the period of 2003 to 2008, Google had gained more popularity and growth and entered the field of advertisement. Google AdWords, later changed to Google Ads or Pay Per Click (PPC) is Google advertising service for business purpose where advertisements are displayed in google. AdSense is a program run by google through which website owners could display the business advertisement in their websites. The change in algorithm will results in the change in the keywords which will affect the viewers website visibility which leads to the decrease in Google’s revenue.
In 2009, Personalised search results and auto suggestions were introduced. Google began to interact more with the user. Even web page ranking was based on user interaction. Pogo Sticking - when a user clicks the first web page and leave the page with out spending time in it and visit the next page and the interaction time in that page is more, then the google give top rank to the second page. By 2010, social media platforms like Facebook and Orkut gain more appreciation among internet users. Even ranking was based on social media considering the influential power.
