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| Search Engine Optimisation SEO History |
Search Engine Optimisation SEO History
By the mid-90s, webmasters had begun to optimise their sites for search engines due to a growing awareness of the importance of being listed by the various engines.
Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit the URL of a web page for it to be indexed. Search engines relied on the meta data, information that webmasters inserted in the code of a web page, to determine what a web page was about and to index it appropriately.
Industry analyst Danny Sullivan records that the earliest known use of the term “search engine optimization” was a spam message posted on Usenet, an online forum or message board, on July 26, 1997.
Realising the importance of being ranked highly in search results, webmasters began using the search engine’s reliance on meta data to manipulate the ranking for their web sites. To combat this, search engines in turn have developed more complex algorithms including a number of other ranking factors.
While at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a search engine, called Backrub, that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rank web pages. They founded Google in 1998, which relied on PageRank, hyperlink analysis as well as onpage factors to determine the prominence of a web page. This enabled Google to avoid the same kind of manipulation of on-page factors to determine ranking.
Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit the URL of a web page for it to be indexed. Search engines relied on the meta data, information that webmasters inserted in the code of a web page, to determine what a web page was about and to index it appropriately.
Industry analyst Danny Sullivan records that the earliest known use of the term “search engine optimization” was a spam message posted on Usenet, an online forum or message board, on July 26, 1997.
Realising the importance of being ranked highly in search results, webmasters began using the search engine’s reliance on meta data to manipulate the ranking for their web sites. To combat this, search engines in turn have developed more complex algorithms including a number of other ranking factors.
While at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a search engine, called Backrub, that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rank web pages. They founded Google in 1998, which relied on PageRank, hyperlink analysis as well as onpage factors to determine the prominence of a web page. This enabled Google to avoid the same kind of manipulation of on-page factors to determine ranking.
