Search engine optimization (SEO) largely revolves around Google today. However, the practice we now know as SEO predates the world's most popular search engine, co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. SEO means search engine optimization. Rand Fishkin, founder and former CEO of Moz, defines the term as “the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic earned through organic search engine results.
It all started when Tim Berners-Lee shared his invention of the first browser in history, the World Wide Web, more often known as the “Web”. In August 1991, web pioneers published a code library (LibWWW) so that participants could create their own browsers and web servers. In 1998, Sergei Brin and Lawrence Page, the creators of Google, published an article entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” as part of their research project while studying at Stanford University. In it, they wrote that “the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising.
The objectives of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. It's important to note here that you did this based on the quality of the content and not just the search keyword. Many search engines have risen and bitten the dust over the years, unlike Google, which seems to be going stronger and stronger. Here's a comparison of SEO tactics over time and the impact they've had on the way searches work across devices.
On October 17, 2002, SearchKing filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court, Western District of Oklahoma, against the search engine Google. While SEO predates Google, the rise of this search engine giant, started by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, has dominated SEO attention for almost 20 years. Search engines have made those activities as old-fashioned as buggy whips, hoop skirts, and door-to-door brush vendors. As the world's first internet search engine, Google is the most important site to focus on when it comes to improving your SEO profile and benefiting from healthy rankings for search terms relevant to your niche.
Bing debuted in June, with Microsoft aggressively promoting it as the search engine that would produce noticeably better results than Google. Today, Google continues to dominate the search engine space, with nine out of ten queries going through its algorithm. Not only were there no ranking criteria at the time, but by the time search engines set the algorithms accordingly, there were already new black hat SEO practices that the fixes didn't address. But in 2001, Brin and Page appeared in Charlie Rose, when the host asked them: Why does it work so well? As part of his response, Brin emphasized that—at the time—Google was a search engine and nothing else, and he was looking at the web as a whole, and not just what words appear on each page.
Basically, the better your website is optimized, the higher it can rank in search engine results. With search engines becoming household names and more families connected to the Internet, searching for information became easier. Search engines can penalize sites they discover using black or gray hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or removing their listings from their databases altogether. In 2003, the term “search engine optimization” first appeared on Wikipedia, consolidating its status within Internet culture and inspiring a burgeoning industry of consultants and analysts who help companies reach the top positions in search engine results.
White hat SEO isn't just about following guidelines, but about ensuring that the content that a search engine indexes and then ranks is the same content a user will see. In fact, according to Search Engine Journal, the only notable difference was Bing's tendency to prioritize keywords in URLs, as well as favoring capitalized words and “large site pages”. .
