The invention of the internet and the World Wide Web has been considered to be one of the most important inventions of the 20th century. Its impact on the world today is undeniable and almost every facet of our lives is intertwined with the internet. When it first launched there were a lot of flaws, and humans being humans wanted to streamline that process of searching and indexing. Hence, this led to the optimization of websites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloguing the early Web. This entire process eventually led to the rise of professional SEO services in India also along with the other countries.

Particular individuals assigned to the task were called webmasters and content providers. In the beginning, they initially were only required to submit the address of a page or URL to the various engines which would send a “spider” to “crawl” that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed. This is a two-part process, which involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine’s own server. A second program, known as an indexer, extracts information about the page. This information includes things such as the words it contains, where they are located, and any weight for specific words, as well as all links the page contains. All of this information is then stored into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

Very soon website owners recognized the value of a high ranking and visibility in search engine results, thus creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. The earliest versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword Meta tag or index files in various engines. Meta tags provided a guide to each page’s content. As time progressed it was soon concluded that relying on Metadata to index pages was impractical. As it depended on the webmaster’s choice of keywords in the Meta tag, which could potentially mean an inaccurate representation of the site’s actual content. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent data in Meta tags caused pages to rank higher for irrelevant searches.

Web content providers also manipulated some attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank higher in search engines.  By the late 90s, search engine designers recognized that webmasters were making efforts to rank well in their search engine. Some were even manipulating their rankings by adding in irrelevant or excess keywords. These are termed as black hat SEO practices.

In order to keep businesses healthy, some Search engines reach out to the SEO industry and frequently sponsor and are guests at conferences, web chats, and seminars. Many companies have guidelines and information to help with website optimization. Google even has a program to help webmasters learn if the indexing is up to par.

A growing country like India is a major market for SEO, and there are numerous up and coming SEO services. In order to extract more data and clicks, many websites also consult PPC services in India for better results.

1 thought on “Search Engine Optimization: How it really began

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *