Evolution of SEO

With the evolution of Internet, the earliest search engines started to appear around early 1990s. The searchalgorithms used during these early days were primitive and thus did little or no link analysis to rate the relevancy ofthe pages retrieved. Examples of these engines were JumpStation, the World Wide Web Worm, and the Repository-Based Software Engineering (RBSE) spider. The problem with these was that they listed results in the order that theywere found and provided no discrimination based on the quality and relevancy of the results.

By the year 1996, site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites ranked higher in search engine results. This paved the platform for the advent of keyword based search engine optimization.

Initially, search engines were supplied with information about the pages by the webmasters themselves. Initial versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information, such as keyword meta-tags, which providedan indication about the contents of each page. But indexing pages based upon meta-tag data were found to be lessreliable, because sometimes meta-tags included irrelevant keywords to artificially increase page impressions for thewebsites. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent meta-data in meta-tags caused pages to show up for irrelevantsearches, and failed to appear for relevant searches. Search engines responded by developing more complex algorithms, taking into account various additional factors as well. Examples of these included the PageRank algorithm developed by Google, which ranked web pages based on the number and quality of links found2. Thesearch results now retrieved are better than the earlier search results as the new results are ranked in order of relevancy and frequency of the appearances of the searched keywords.