History of Search Engine Optimisation
Where did it all begin? Well for many of us it was back in 1996, although a degree of SEO was practiced in the United States prior to that. The internet commercially had been around for only a short time, in the UK it was really in its infancy. Broadband connectivity hadn’t been thought of and the first websites had huge download times on a 56k modem.
1996 - 97 So how did it all start? Well our expertise was cut at the beginning in the UK market. At that time Alta Vista was the main search engine and Google was just in concept format in a university dorm room under the name of Backrub. Amazingly even then the Backrub search technology was focused on counting back links!!
Although Alta Vista was ahead of the pack the playing field was actually quite level, the majority searchers were evenly split across search engines such as MSN, Lycos, Excite, Yahoo, Netscape and Info Seek.
Getting listed was about as easy as could be, put the keywords in the tags in sufficient density and you would pretty much be there. Index cycles were as little as a week, identifying what worked was drilled down in a month… ah yes life was easy then!
For us even back then we had our concerns. After launching a property website with 600 html pages we found that some generic searches returned our URL and its internal pages in every position for the first 4 pages of the search results. We knew that wasn’t how it should work but we didn’t know how to reign it in.
We were learning our trade!!
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