History and Evolution of Search Engine Optimization

 Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the activity of optimizing web pages or whole sites    in order to make them search engine friendly, thus getting higher position in search results. Ways of optimization: On Page Optimization and Off Page Optimization. Types of SEO: White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO

A Brief History

SEO is a millennial

Google was officially launched in 1998. In early days, google was not much famous. The domain google.com was registered in 1997. The searching result was not appeared at the same time simultaneously. The users had to search in URL along with their email id and name so that result visible within 24 hours. Then yahoo becomes famous than google. The world trade center terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, changed politically and emotionally of united states. The attack may have also changed how leading search engine, Google thinks of itself. Some of the google users search about the breaking news but no such result may founded. Early days, the google in classic sense of term were poor places to find news of breaking events. Their crawling and indexing processes paid no special attention to news sources, and they had no mechanism to turn spiders' attention to relevant news sources.  The solution to recover these issues the google officials decided to publish the document which contain optimization tips and guidelines to the web masters. So that google can achieve more upgradation. But some of them used over practices it led to some quality issues in results. 

Evolution of SEO

SEO initially focused on content, linking, keywords and some tactic to rank higher in search results. The definition of SEO started changing after, google began to refine SEO techniques. Today, the ever-evolving SEO comprises a range of factors that includes keywords and links. Google changed its algorithm structure for crawling and ranking pages. While most of content was ranked based on-page factors and now sites were ranked based on on-page and off-page factors. 

And this, to a great extent, helped curb problem of keyword stuffing, is the practice of inserting large number of keywords into the web content in attempt to artificially increases the page ranking. However, this led to some quality problem in search results and google launched to curb black hat link specification practices. Some websites would start to sell links it's an unethical black hat process to manipulating ranking position. so that it led to some quality issues in search results. So that google stepped into another tactic that to provide quality link specific, that it's one of those sources from high quality website. Therefore, sites with more quality link tend to earn higher page ranking. It's a ranking process works on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the ideal score. many websitors who buy and sell the highly page ranking links this again led to quality result problem, so google decided to attain next strategy passing the juice was introduced. The value or quality passed from one page or site to another. Value passed through hyperlink. Search engines considered links as votes by other websites. An attribute named re=no follow provided along with passing the juice. No follow value for rel link attribute is used to signal to search engines that they shouldn't follow these links and therefore shouldn't pass any equity authority to link target. 

(For example, :<a href ="https://www.google.com">rel="nofollow">google<a>) 

In 2000, AdWords advertisement program was introduced. Google AdWords is a pay-per-clicked online advertisement that allows advertisers to display their ads on googles search engine page.

                      

In 2003, AdSense was focused its a free-of-charge, simply way to earn money by displaying ads next to your online content. With AdSense, you can show relevant and engaging ads to your site visitors. 

In 2008, android was launched. It focused on user's friendly platform. It attains personalized search results that tracking where your site ranks for keyword search terms is not always crystal clear. Users will see different results for same search terms.

In 2009, ranking was based on as per users' interaction with website, it tracks how many people visit the website and how often they visited. Website with more user interaction will have higher rank. The term bounce rate that tracks number of people who visit the page and leaves without viewing other pages on the site. Higher bounce rate website has lower rank rate and if the bounce rate percentage is about to between 30 and 50 then it considered as excellent, trustworthy with higher rank.

In 2010, social media signals were introduced by google. when you post content on website social media gives you access to a much wider audience, ultimately, the more people visiting the site content, the positive user signals benefit the search rankings.