Essay: History of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is a complex of efforts aimed at the increase of a website’s position in the primary search engine results. Why do websites want to appear on the first result page of a search engine? Doubtless, it is money and fame. Some information resources want to increase their traffic. Commercial resources want to attract the wider audience of the potential customers. Both kinds of resources receive money if they increase traffic and possess a huge army of the devoted clients. Many websites pay money to appear on the first results pages of a search engine. Why? Because very few users look through the websites that are located on the second and third result pages in Google and other search engines. Thus, it is vital to occupy the leading position in the Internet if you want to promote and develop your resource. When your website is on the first results page, more users will pay attention to it. As a result, you will earn more money.

Very few users understand that it is very difficult to optimize the work of a search engine. It is a very delicate and energy-consuming job. There are several factors that can reduce the rating of a website. The foremost factor is plagiarized content. The second is spam. Then, there is an excessive number of the external links and other factors. Every search engine (Google, Bing and Yahoo) looks for the key words written by the user in billions of texts that can be found in the Internet. Its following task is to evaluate the actual genuine source of this text. Most often, search engines evaluate the same copies of texts according to the date of their publication. For example, one website uploaded a specific text two years ago. Another website published it yesterday. Without question, the first website is supposed to be a full right owner of this text.

The text on the second site is treated like plagiarism. What is more, the second website’s rating is reduced if there are not any links that inform about the first website as a primary source of the utilized data. As you see, a professional and trustworthy search engine should be able to pay attention to these factors in order to provide a web resource with the objective rating. According to the latest surveys, Google search engine is the ‘fairest’ and the most objective one. In fact, search engine optimization is followed by the optimization of the commercial resources. They try to find various loopholes in a search engine to trick it and to win the first places on its results page. No wonder, it is easy to find numerous resources possessing artificial popularity. Although their content looks like a complete plagiarism, they still occupy the leading position in the search engine results.

Of course, we speak about the unpaid search engine results here. You ought to realize that the results page is divided into two parts. The first upper part of the page is devoted to the paid search results. Big corporations, prosperous companies and agencies pay money to the leading services like Google, Bing and Yahoo to place their websites on the primary results page of a search engine. These webpages are emphasized with the specific color and other effects to differentiate them optically from the organic search results. When you see an ad on the right of the first results page, you should know that these webpages have been offered by your search engine whereas someone has paid for them. The second part of the page is devoted to the organic or unpaid results that struggle for the leading position in the search results applying the method of fair competition. In fact, it is hard to say that the websites are ranked fairly.

Webmasters utilize numerous tricks to reach their goal. Unfortunately, numerous high-quality and authentic websites lose their rating because of such cheaters. No wonder, many users became dissatisfied with the work of the prominent search engines. The only method to obtain credit from the user’s side was to optimize search engines. In simple words, an updated and improved search engine should be able to detect unfair and poor-quality websites reducing their rating. This job sounds to be easy; however, developers and webmasters have to take into account numerous factors: the originality of a text, its primary source, links, key words, etc.

Search engine optimization appeared in 1990s being the result of the development of
search engines. By that time, the Internet had already become enough popular all over the world and it contained much information that required optimization and logical arrangement regarding its content. Undoubtedly, it was difficult to evaluate the content of a website objectively. In 1990s, webmasters and content providers paid much attention to the text on a web-page, the keywords in meta tags and other internal factors. It is not a secret that it is much easier to sort a huge number of websites according to the texts located there. Thus, much attention is paid to key words and other textual elements. Unfortunately, it is easy to manipulate these factors. Consequently, many websites managed to cheat search engines and create their rating artificially manipulating their meta tags, keywords, etc. As a result, the leading position in search engine results was occupied by the websites devoted to ads. It reduced the quality of search engines considerably. When you were looking for a specific scientific term, you could have found a dubious website devoted to clothes or banking. The texts on such websites were obscure and contained numerous mistakes. However, they contained your required keywords that were skillfully inserted into the main text of an ad.

In 1997, numerous search engine designers noticed that the majority of webmasters manipulated their rankings with the help of the keywords that were used in the most unexpected places of a text. The earliest search engines (like AltaVista or Infoseek) and  has to adjust their algorithms to defeat the problem of the improper and unethical key word usage.

In 1998, PageRank algorithm was created. It was aimed at the analysis of the inbound links that exist on different websites. In simple words, it helped detect original content in the Internet. What is more, it has become possible to detect the primary source of the required information.

PageRank pays more attention to the external factors. This algorithm made Google the best search engine of the current time. Google was founded in 1998 and attracted many users at once. The reason is obvious. This search engine possesses simple design and structure. The most important thing about Google is its specific approach towards the analysis of the websites it searches. Other search engines focus on the on-page factors, such as meta tags, keywords, headings, etc. Google utilizes PageRank algorithm and takes into consideration on-page and off-page factors. Hyperlink analysis is one of the weightiest off-page factors that influence the originality of the particular content on a website. Google has decided to penalize all websites that utilized unfair methods of artificial ranking. For instance, when a website copies or plagiarizes content from another website, it is penalized by Google. It loses its position in the search engine result page. By 2004, Google had improved its algorithms to detect the unfair websites beneficially. I should say that Google is one of the several search engines that have tried to improve the quality of their work intensively. Furthermore, Google is the undeniable leader among the existing search engines whereas it adds something new into its work every year. It means that this corporation strives to be the best helper for every user. For instance, it announced a specific policy that tied users to Google. It began personalizing search results paying attention to the history of the previous searches. This innovation was hotly discussed by numerous experts, because it broke the rules of the objective ranking. Other researchers supported this innovation stating that the search engine becomes closer to its devoted clients.

In 2005, an international conference, Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web, attracted attention of the prominent developers and researchers who tried to create the method of search engine optimization. They discussed the problem of the aggressive techniques of numerous companies whose websites should be banned from the search results.

What is the future of search engine optimization? Without doubt, the future of SEO
will be focused on the promotion of the unique content. Websites will have to create completely non-plagiarized and personalized texts in order to ‘exist’ in Google. Moreover, this content will be of better quality. SEO will be integrated into all possible assets of Google in order to make the process of finding the needed information easier and faster. Finally, Google becomes ‘cleverer’ every year. In 2014, it announced Google Hummingbird that enabled the search engine to process and understand the natural language and its semantics better.

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