What is Search Engine Optimisation?
Search engine optimisation also known as SEO is the process and science of making certain web pages more attractive to the search engine. Most people who look up information on the web usually only look through the highest ranked search results, or the first page of results. This means that the higher your website is the more views it gets.
SEO tends to focus on certain techniques like making sure that each web page has correct meta and title tags. It also makes sure that key words and phrases for a particular page are distributed evenly throughout the content in a way that the particular search engine will like.
SEO's find web pages through spidering software. Not all search engine spidering software works the same way, so therefore what gives a page a high ranking on one search engine may not give it on another search engine.
A Little History
The world wide web came to life in November of 1990, with the launch of the first ever web server. In order to use the world wide web effectively a web crawler or robot if you like was needed this was developed by a student called Matthew Grey.
Throughout the years there were adjustments and alterations made to the web crawler and in 1994 the first fully operational crawler was born. In the years that followed this creation, many search engines came on board offering the same service with slight differences. There were many successful engines launched at this time including,
- Go To which is now commonly known as Overture, this company introduced the concept of pay per click (PPC) in 1997. Instead of ranking sites in the usual way which was based on formula, they allowed open bidding for certain keywords, the highest bidder got the highest ranking on the web. Today all major search engines rely on pay per click listings to generate revenue.
- In 1998 the concept of user feedback was introduced by a company called Direct Hit. This group allocated ranking according to who's listings were clicked most by users. This system worked for a while but the ability of manipulation was soon recognised, none of today's search engines use this form of feedback.
Search Engine Optimisation has advanced greatly throughout the past few years, it is a wonderful tool which enables computer users to access the web with relative ease.
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Reference:
http://www.bigmouthmedia.com/live/articles/seo_history.asp
http://www.stickynewmedia.co.uk/articles/4/index.php
