Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a tool that has been used for numerous years. Many people can’t imagine what the internet would be like without it – but when was it created? And why did it become so important to the internet and marketing at large?
The 1990s
The 1990s was a pivotal decade in the development of the internet and SEO. In 1990, the first search engine was created. Dubbed Archie, this search engine was the best way to find information at the time and was the springboard for other search engines throughout the decade.
In 1994, some of the heavy-hitting search engines were created, including Yahoo and Alta Vista. The Google co-founders began building their search engine under the name BackRub in 1996, and Google.com was finally registered as a domain name in 1997.
As search engines grew in popularity and more people began to use them daily, the site owners started to see their potential. Simple changes meant that search engines could be monetised, and so SEO was born.
However, the start of SEO was far from perfect. The best practices we abide by today hadn’t been developed yet, so users found pages stuffed with spammy keywords, backlinks, and messy websites to drive more traffic to their sites to attract advertisers.
The 2000s
Google set themselves the task of cleaning up the SEO industry, providing guidance for white hat SEO to help companies rank ethically and without spammy tactics. However, following these practices didn’t relate to the rankings, so nobody obeyed Google’s proposed guidelines.
As a result, Google decided to take a more aggressive approach. In November 2003, they released their Florida update, and many sites lost their rankings, leading to a huge outcry from the web community. Although it was aimed to target those using spammy tactics to rank, many small businesses came up as false positives for spam and were put out of business. As the update occurred just before the holidays, the owners of the websites were outraged, and Google, therefore, promised never to release an update before Christmas again.
In 2005, there were more changes. Google united with fellow search engine giants Yahoo and MSN for the Nofollow Attribute, a creation designed to decrease spam links and comments on websites. In June of the same year, Google then introduced the personalised search that we know today, basing search results on browsing history to provide more relevant results.
More shake-ups were announced in 2009 with the advent of Bing, Microsoft’s answer to Google. However, it did not have the impact that Microsoft wanted, and their SEO advice did not contrast Google’s all that much – the only significant differences were:
- Prioritising keywords in URLs
- Favouring capitalised words
- Favouring pages from larger sites
In late 2009, Google announced their new Caffeine update that would speed up website crawling and allow sites to be ranked in almost real-time. It wasn’t released for a while, but the move pushed SEO to the forefront of the internet. No longer was it just for webmasters, but copywriters, journalists, and site builders.
The 2010s
During the 2010s, SEO as we know it began to develop. Google cracked down on sites that exploited their algorithm and penalised sites they found shirking the rules. They additionally targeted content farms that published mass amounts of low-quality content. Panda, the update released at the time, looked for their high ad-to-content ratios and penalised them accordingly.
In 2012, Penguin updates were released to target websites that used subtle tactics to navigate around white hat SEO techniques. Many of these pages had content that was primarily informative but with hyperlinks that were not related to the actual content.
The biggest change in this era came in 2015 when Google announced that websites that were not optimised for mobiles would begin to be penalised. This sent the message that design was essential for SEO now, not just words and content. In 2016, Google then cracked down further on mobile pop-ups, signalling the direction that SEO is still moving into to this day.
The Future of SEO
SEO continues to improve and change to this day, with even more changes on the horizon. Google is already focusing on a mobile-heavy user experience as 51% of media is now consumed on mobile phones, and SEO is moving in that direction consistently.
Another key change is that of voice search. With the popularity of voice searches via digital assistants such as Alexa and Google Nest devices, experts theorise that voice search will soon be optimised and will be something that marketers and writers will have to consider when creating content.
Social media will also continue to be a driving force of SEO. When you Google a person, their social media profiles often appear, directing people to sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. This can influence rankings now but may be a bigger factor in the future as more and more people flock to social media.
Although backlinks are still important in the world of SEO, some experts think that the future lies elsewhere. Although links are great at boosting visibility and raising brand awareness, content should focus on the searcher’s intent before focusing on link building as an SEO strategy.
Conclusion
SEO is an ever-evolving tool that will continue to change and shift in the future. From humble beginnings in the 1990s, it has advanced massively, weeding out bad content and providing concrete guidelines that marketers follow to this day.
As long as there are search engines, SEO is needed to ensure that the great content gets to the top.
