How SEO Improved the Internet
On February 27th, 2021, Loren Baker shared a brief history of search engine optimization in Search Exchange Journal (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-101/seo-history/).
SEO is extremely important to the public today. It has revolutionized the way we browse the internet and how the internet browses us. In today’s world, search engine optimization (SEO) is a fairly familiar concept to most companies and more specifically advertisers. Companies are constantly looking to have their pages placed better in various engines’ search results. However all the way back in 1997 the idea of SEO and good rankings on search engines was considered by many to be a new and / or foreign concept. Back in the early days of SEO, the best way to rank high in search engines was to use your website’s keywords multiple times throughout your website. Around this time SEO was only based on on-page content. The four main factors that one could optimize for were “making sure the content was good and relevant. There was enough text. Your HTML tags were accurate. You had internal links and outbound links” (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-101/seo-history/).
However in 2000, when Google rose to fame, SEO started to include not only on-page content/criteria but also off-page factors. At this time Google had already implemented their web crawler and PageRank algorithm, which were iconic and newfound for their time. “Google looked at both on-page and off-page factors – the quantity and quality of external links pointing to a website (as well as the anchor text used)” (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-101/seo-history/).
The article essentially reads like a love letter to Google, citing all of the advances made by Google since 2000, but the article also highlights the effect of social media and mobile applications on search engines and search engine optimization. In sum, SEO has helped people hone in on the information they need at a much more rapid pace while providing companies with a means to get their messages across in a targeted way.