Here’s a brief history of SEO and why you need to know that for the promotion of your business

Trying to trace the history of SEO is like trying to trace the history of the first bread – we all know in some moment of history man discovered that it is pretty good to bake a mix of ground cereals and water. Eventually, we don’t think much about its origins and how today it impacts us, just enjoy the pastries.

SEO is pretty young and it changes almost every day. We can say SEO is about 30 years old, and in that short time evolved pretty fast, just like any other algorithm – just see how much Google algorithms have changed in the past 10-20 years.

Where SEO history started, and how it became so important? In this little guide, we’ll bread you through the history of SEO and explain everything you need to know about its importance.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization also is known as SEO, as we all know, is a very popular, constantly-evolving digital marketing practice that strengthens the brand voice, and boosts website traffic and ROI (return on investment). It’s very inexpensive, but highly effective, making SEO popular and highly recommended part of every marketing strategy – but no one ever asks how it all started.

SEO evolved so much ever since because the internet and user’s behavior on the internet changes every day, so these changes led to the evolution of Search Engine Optimization techniques so it can be accommodated to all that various needs.

History of need to archive data

The first idea for making some conjoint archive for all the world’s data came in 1945 when Dr. Vannevar Bush, director of Office of Scientific Research and Development published an article in The Atlantic proposing a “collection of data and observations, the extraction of parallel material from the existing record, and the final insertion of new material into the general body of the common record.” When we think about it today, we can recognize something that refers to nowadays Google.

After a few decades, precisely in 1990, Alan Emtage, a student of McGill University created something like a very first search engine and called it Archie. Archie was the best way for searching for information from other servers for that time. 

From 1990 to these years Search Engines took crucial developments – from the invention of more commercial Search Engines to a complex system that can measure all parameters crucial for marketing that we know today.

In February 1993 group of six Stanford students create Architext, which would later become the search engine Excite. Excite was revolutionary because it could sort results based on keywords found within content.

In June 1993 Matthew Gray debuted World Wide Web Wanderer, which later became commonly known as Wandex. It was a Perl-based web crawler used to measure the size of the World Wide Web.

In 1994 Alta Vista, Infoseek, Lycos, and Yahoo search engines saw daylight.

In 1996 Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin started to build a search engine that they initially called BackRub.

In September 1997 history was written – Google.com is registered as a domain name.

Of course, as search engines became more popular and widely used, site owners started to realize its multiple benefits. It became clear that some really simple actions, search engine results could be used in earning money on the internet.

2000’s – An Era of changes

According to multiple resources, the term SEO was coined in 1997. when the manager of the Jefferson Starship, a popular rock band wanted better ranking for its band on the first SERP. Yet in 1999, as part of the Search Engine Strategies conference the first official search marketing event was held.

First SEO experts were focused more on keywords stuffing and removing spammy backlinks for ranking higher in search results. Nowadays, SEO is more sophisticated than ever, also giving better results in return.

Today, Google is constantly developing smarter ways to produce genuine, useful, and relevant search results that can give welfare to both users and website owners. Search intent became one of the crucial priorities, with Google’s indexing techniques producing contextually relevant search results based on user search history, device, location, age, sex, etc. Videos and images became more and more important due to its visual content helping websites rank better on Google. 

In the last 10-15 years, social media took a significant role in creating a marketplace both for businesses and users – strategically-placed Facebook, Instagram or YouTube ads can get you more visitors and more traffic on your website than you can imagine. Unlikely any other channel, with the latest upgrades SEO is probably the most efficient and affordable marketing strategy that exists today and in which you can invest your money without regret. 

You can understand how important it is for your website to be trusted – Google likes websites that customers like, and there is the moment of optimization of your website for the best performance because it’s a significant part of search ranking; If your website is slow it’s more likely it will have a poor ranking, and in that case, SEO can’t do anything. Before you start to make an SEO strategy choose a reliable hosting provider – according to Website Planet Hostinger that guarantees the best uptime in all packages, and it’s also very affordable. SEO’s precise targeting can bring you customers who are actively looking to find what you offer – product, service, whatsoever, so a combination of good hosting and good SEO strategy can be the best thing you can do for your business. With a good strategy, some time, and a small amount of money, SEO can help you bring more customers to your business than any other marketing tactic.

Conclusion

A long period of development and importance it has, making SEO one of the most powerful marketing weapons. Today, SEO maintenance is a full-time job which requests sometimes teams of specialists to get everything done properly and most efficiently. Executing it well requires a high level of skill, ethics, and upkeep on technology. If you’re thinking about establishing SEO for your website think about hiring someone who can do it for you, with experience and a good portfolio. Good luck!