What Is SEO and How Has It Changed Throughout the Years?

 Many business owners here will hear the phrase "search engine optimization" (or SEO) from business friends or even the competition and may see it as a way to increase sales, but what is SEO? Alternatively, a business owner may have tried "SEO services" in the past and found that it either didn't work as well as expected or it worked but was no longer as efficient. 

The article explains what SEO is and why it is 'new'. SEO works better than ever. I've worked on search engine optimization and website market ranking before it was called SEO. What is SEO? Here is an overview of some of the changes in SEO since the turn of the century and the SEO services offered or provided by your SEO agency.

We look at SEO over the years and explain what SEO is today and how you can use it better for your website.

SEO in 2000

At the turn of the millennium, the "big" search engines most people used were lyco and passionate. Indeed. At the time, only a very small percentage of the UK population had internet access, and those who "dial-up" were slow.

Websites were one or two pages of basic information which made them load faster (in 20 seconds) than SEO methods consisted of 'hiding' as many keywords as possible on a page, ie the web. The site was found for these searches so the page is not shown as spam to visitors.

In 2002

Google introduced something called 'AdWords' and predicted the demise of SEO as people can now pay a significant price to start searching the web on the No. 1 website.

In 2003

 Yahoo bought Inktomi, AltaVista, and Fast, which was basically the end of all "small" search engines. Google has started tackling 'spam' websites and practices. At the same time, Google realized that "AdWords" would not destroy SEO, and in fact "natural listings" were encouraging visitors to return to their search engine platform. Google started recognizing "professional SEO" experts and promoted good SEO instead of spam.

The first "banned" website on the Internet was seen in 2004 when Google cracked down on the spam websites. He also took legal action against the responsible "SEO company".

In 2006 

you only needed links to your website for a website to rank, What is SEO? so buying links/link exchanges was all the rage and most websites had a webpage where they listed companies. What was and the links to your site (still it amazes me how many websites continue this process)).

Between 2004 and 2008

Google, now the one and only "player" in the world of search engines, started breaking cases and adding misbehavior, and encouraging spam and link purchases. "Noughties" has virtually eliminated all "naughty" methods of SEO as Google has focused on ranking websites based on their content and their relevance to search.

SEO in 2010

Between 2010 and 2015, we started to see search engines overtake the 'social media' sites and soon the results were filled with Twitter's 'tweets'. (I can still see the face of one of my clients when I google his company, and the entire first page of search results is made up of a Twitter conversation where two employees talked about this horrible situation.) That was the company! )

With the Google Caffeine update, videos and photos have been added to the search results.

Google has included "personalized search results" with websites that appear in your previous searches and search results based on the websites you have previously visited. This caused "a bit of a stir" in the SEO world, with users claiming that their websites were "top of Google" for everything related to their industry. They have visited their website many times. Google, of course, has all the websites to them for all relevant searches. This could be a problem until I show them the new 'Google Inkengo Search'.

The website had to be ranked to find the most prizes. A 'plumber' in Bristol would like to rank for this search, and that was the focus.

Google's "Panda" and "Penguin" updates symbolically wiped out "Link Exchange," including heavy fines for websites with unrelated links.