SEO Lineage

With the increasing use of the internet, the world has become a small place indeed. You really do not have to go to a library or turn the pages of an encyclopedia or ten books to get information about something. It is really difficult to find one person who is not net savvy. You can get answers to almost every question of yours online. Did we ever think that what is the entire system behind all this? Nobody is doing any charity for us by answering us our questions. This whole thing is serious business. We are the ones who sit back at home and conduct searches over the internet. This in turn helps in expanding internet marketing. It has a lot to do with SEO.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process that enables the increase of the visibility of any website or web page in search engines. This increase in visibility is conducted via the natural or unpaid search results. If these terms are becoming too confusing, then here is a little bit of explanation in layman’s terms. SEO is the process through which the trafficking is increased to a particular web page or website. The increase in the frequency of the appearance of a site in the search results will automatically lead visitors to that website. This then gives a website or a web page its web presence.

The initial roots of Search Engine Optimization can be traced back in the mid 1990s. It was Webmasters and the content providers and content writers who began with their activities of optimizing sites for search engines. The initial process was quite different from what it is in the present times. Webmasters has to submit the address of a page to different engines. These engines would then send a web crawler that extracted links to other pages from it and then return back the acquired information found on the page that has to be indexed. This was quite a grueling process then. However with time, site owners started to realize that the visibility of their sites in search results is something that would make their business do better. Industry analyst Danny Sullivan has mentioned that the phrase ‘search engine optimization’ became prevalent in the year 1997.

When it comes to search engines, one cannot simply ignore Google. Google was founded in 1998 and its simple design almost became the saving grace for a huge number of internet users. Considerations of off-page factor and on-page factors helped Google to cast off the manipulations that were seen in other search engines as they only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Here I would like to mention that on-page optimization refers to factors that have some effect or the other on your website listing in natural search results. With time, the tags of the leading search engines have been attributed to Google and Yahoo. They never disclose the algorithms that they use to rank pages. Since 2005, Google has been personalizing search results for each user and by 2009; it had disclosed that it had taken necessary measures to mitigate the effects of PageRank sculpting.

Google took a further leap by announcing in December 2009 that it would be using the web search history of all its users for populating search results. In order to make search results timelier and relevant, Real-time-search was introduced in late 2009. The social networking sites and blogs have become immensely popular and are in vogue these days. This has also influenced this SEO business. Owing to their growing popularity, several search engines have made changes to their algorithms so that fresh contents rank quickly within search results. This is an absolutely latest approach by search engines and it gives primacy to the contents that are recent, fresh and unique. The topic of social bookmarking comes with social networking. Through this internet users organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Social bookmarking has also become immensely popular and this has also influenced the domain of search engine optimization. Many people have started using it as a tool along with search engine optimization in order to increase the visibility of their websites or web pages.

Webmasters has done some significant tasks in the business of search engine optimization. Since the beginning it has been making efforts to rank the well in their search engines. In the present scenario, Webmasters tools from Google can be considered to be indispensable and highly needed for those who intend to optimize their sites for indexing in Google. Google launched another free tool for webmasters called Google Analytics towards the end of 2005. This informs you about your visitors and the traffic patterns of your site. Google Analytics is very useful for regular readers as it bestows with several easily-accessible information that would enhance one’s quality of work. This webmasters tool of Google is great for the marketing division of any company as it reports on the most effective search keywords, most popular sources for referring and the visitors’ geographical location, as well as the performance of banner ads, PPC keyword campaigns, and email newsletters.

There can be no one particular online marketing strategy. Strategies and plans keep getting discovered everyday. A successful online marketing strategy can drive organic traffic that has been achieved through optimization techniques and not paid advertising. However it can also involve the use of paid advertising on search engines and other pages as per the needs.

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SEO – The Past, Present & Future

The field of search engine optimization has been witnessing rapid changes and the same trend will continue in the future also. So, both webmasters and SEO service providers have to be on their toes always to cope with these changes. We’ll take a look at the evolution search engine optimization over the years and its future ahead.

The Past

During the beginning of search engine optimization in the late 1990s, more attention was given to optimizing the on-page factors of websites rather than building link popularity through off-page optimization. We’ll discuss both on-page and off-page optimization in detail later in this article. The reason behind lack of efforts on link popularity is webmasters and Internet marketers were exchanging links with other related websites freely. That was enough to bring traffic to their websites. Banner ads were actually popular during this period.

During the early 2000’s, the popularity of link building gained momentum. You can say, this was the beginning of the era when link popularity outclassed on-page activities. Numerous websites concentrated on building more and more links from related websites and creating sub-domains. On the other hand, it was also the era of rising SEO companies who adopted unprincipled and unfair strategies and techniques to achieve link popularity.

During the middle period of 2000’s, more than 75 percent of all SEO activities were focused on link popularity. This period also witnessed the rise of social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon, Orkut, etc. that revolutionized the process of interlinking. Search engine optimization turned so prominent that it did away with the need of listing on Yellow Pages for countless businesses around the world. This period was also important for Google as it established itself as the number one search engine.

The Present

Talking about the present scenario, the concept of SEO is in full swing and has become the paramount choice of online businesses to promote their products or services. As stated by Internet Retailer Magazine, the expenditure on search engine optimization worldwide is expected to rise by a staggering 43% this year.

As far as link popularity is concerned, there is no sign of dying away as more than 80 percent of all activities are currently revolved around link building. Such is the craze of link popularity that links have got the status of commodity and are often traded over the Internet by link brokers. The PageRank toolbar offered by Google regarding the importance of a web page has lost some of its sheen for ranking intentions, but it continues to exist for viewing by web surfers only.

As the number of websites is presently numbered in millions, the competition for optimizing the majority of 2-word phrases is getting tougher. The keywords that had mere 50,000 search results some 6 years back have now more than 300,000 search results, thereby making the task of top 10 ranking all the more difficult. This implies that only the most innovative SEO techniques employed by the most competent SEO firms can get you the top ranks for your targeted keywords. So, guaranteed optimization services are not a cakewalk anymore. The advice for webmasters is to choose a service provider cautiously after planning their expenses meticulously.

The Future

In the future, search engines will start to present search results that can be controlled locally. Though noteworthy progress has already been made in this regard by Google, it would be more prevalent in the days to come. Browser-specific results will also be witnessed. Link building will continue its growing streak, but the evaluation of links will get trickier with the advent of more complicated search engine algorithms and link determination factors. On-page optimization will get back to the popularity chart with mounting emphasis on cutting down the website size. Video search will grow in stature with the potential to become the most preferred choice of online marketing.

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