As with all things Internet, the history of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), sometimes called Search Engine Marketing (SEM), is short but filled with major achievements and hugely successful applications. This is the second article in a series looking at the importance of SEO/SEM. Go to http://guerrilla-viral-marketing.suite101.com/article.cfm/search_engine_optimization for the first of the series.
History and success stories are important to learning to use any tool – especially a tool as useful and powerful as SEO/SEM. The evolution has been fast – a short 18 years. Nonetheless, SEO/SEM is wholly responsible for the web as it is today and is what will shape future development.
Search Engine Historical Timeline
There are several different theories behind the start and rise of search engine optimization. Wikipedia provides one of the best and most in-depth timelines starting with the development of Archie in 1990 and Gopher and Veronica in 1991. The World Wide Web Wanderer was developed in 1993.
Archie worked with downloading directory listings while the other programs rose to popularity quickly because of their ability to index and search directory listings. Think of it as using Archie to download listings similar to the yellow page listings in alphabetical order from a phone book. Veronica allowed those listings to be searched by typing in a search word or name, etc.
WebCrawler was the first full text search tool hitting the net in 1994. One of the first commercial search engines, Lycos, came online soon after. Excite, Infoseek, Magellan and one of the fastest growing, Yahoo, were launched in 1996-97. While Mosaic was the first Internet Browser, Netscape was a leading pioneer in bringing the World Wide Web to business and personal desktop computers across the world and it played a vital role in promoting the use of those first five search engines.
Google It
The year 2000 – while everyone was preparing for the biggest and most widespread computer failure ever – google.com exploded on the Internet scene. Google quickly became the favorite and remains today as one of the most effective and most used search engines. Success came so fast to google.com due to the use of a process called PageRank. The process was built on the premise that by ranking pages, these pages will return the best results to a user’s search entry.
According to Wikipedia.org ending December 2007, google.com held 46.47% of the market share with the closet second place holder being Yahoo at 17.16%.
How Important or Effective is SEO/SEM?
Keyworddiscovery.com reports that “80% of all online transactions begin with a keyword search.” Can’t argue with statistics like that. The easiest way to learn about how SEO/SEM works and how effective it is – is to go to each search engine and type in the same search entry and then analyze the results.
Try several different search phrases and enter as much detail in the entry as possible. For example, try entering ‘bookstores in Ohio’ and then try a second search by typing in ‘bookstores in Cleveland, Ohio’ and the results will be much different.
Those results at the top of each list will have bookstore, Ohio and Cleveland on their web site because they will be using SEO/SEM.
A few of the most successful users of SEO/SEM include google.com, amazon.com, travelocity.com and monster.com. These sites and thousands like them use SEO/SEM to drive people to their sites by improving page rankings and generating traffic using several search strategies including paid searches, paid inclusion, direct marketing and link building – all topics for future articles.
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