The Early Days of Search Engines

Search Engine Optimization has certainly evolved over the last 20 years. You’re probably used to search engines with algorithms that define which optimization techniques you should use for your website. Back in the early days of search engines, optimizing a website for a search engine was a lot easier than tracking algorithms. You didn’t even have to worry about things like back-linking, unique content, or hot keyword phrases. Instead, you just had to worry about getting your website listed on the search engine and setting the right META tags in the header section of your website’s HTML coding. The rest took care of itself.

Toward the late 1990s, the first search engines to index webpages from the World Wide Web were brought to the internet. Some of which included Excite, Infoseek, and Altavista. These were all search engines which allowed webmasters to add their webpages to them for free. The webmasters would basically have to fill out a form and describe their website’s name, URL address, and description. Soon after, webmasters could also choose keywords to include with their website submissions. These were supposed to be keywords that represented the content of their website so that interested visitors would be able to find it. This formed the three basic elements of search engine optimization: name, description, and keyword tags. All these were implemented into the META tag coding of a website, which is what search engines were starting to use to track and rank websites.

While all this was going on, the web company Yahoo! was gaining popularity for their free directory services. The Yahoo! Directory was different than a search engine because it was a man-made compilation of the best webpages on the internet. The founders’ goal was to include all the hottest websites of that time period into the Yahoo! Directory, since it was a lot harder for internet users to discover them back then. As a result, more users were setting the Yahoo! Directory as the homepage of their browsers. Yahoo! even allowed webmasters to submit their website for consideration into their directory, but it would cost them $300 to submit it. This didn’t always guarantee their website would be included either. Plus, they’d have to wait a long time just to hear back from Yahoo! customer support to see if they accepted their website submission or not.

In the 2000s, the popularity of free and paid search engines and directories was taking off. Yahoo! eventually created their own actual search engine in 2002. By this point, there was another free search engine called Google that was already taking off. This is the search engine that implemented backlinks into its website ranking system. In other words, if a popular website had a link to a second website, that would create a backlink for the second website and it would increase its rank in Google. The idea was that the more backlinks a particular website had, the more trustworthy and reputable it would be for people to visit. The websites with the most backlinks are the ones which get ranked the highest in the Google search engine.

For more than 10 years, Google has been the number one search engine on the internet. Although its algorithms are modified frequently, the general core of the search engine optimization techniques for it remain the same. For example, your website needs to have original content with keywords integrated into that content. You cannot spam the keywords on your website or else Google will detect it and then blacklist your website. As for backlinks, these will grow as your website continues to grow. You can use social media, wiki pages, and other free sources to help you with this. There are also backlink service providers that you can pay for them to include your website’s URL on their website. This is the nature of what search engine optimization has turned into since the early days of search engines.