The Origin and Future of Search Engine Optimization by Billy Horner

You may be a budding webmaster who is slowly building up your own website in your free-time or a hardcore internet junkie who has a dozen big-sized websites each of which garner a considerable amount of page views per month. But whoever you are, you will definitely have heard about this omnipresent term, named 'SEO'. There is no escape from its clutches, if you are looking to build an online business through your blog or website, you need to modify your websites' pages such that each page is optimized for user-friendly access and is helpful to the end-user.

How did Search Engine Optimization Come into Being?

The history of SEO is a curious one. It arose from a need to organize all the massive information that was being added daily on the web. When Google began operating its services in the early 1990's, the world wide web was undergoing a transformation of massive proportions with many petabytes of user information being added onto the internet daily. All this overloading of information caused major problems in organizing it so that a particular term could be searched for and retrieved easily. One could, of course, search the entire humungous stack of information for a single term, but it would take years if it wasn't properly accessible. In short, they needed a system to index all the web pages that popped up and to find only the most useful links for the user.

Hence, the braniacs at Google came up with the novel idea of assigning value to each link on a web page and a scale of importance was given to each page. Another useful feature they added was to assign a keyword to a web page where the keyword gave a pretty accurate representation of what the web page was all about. This is similar to the alphabetical ordering in the dictionary for easy finding. Also, the keyword is decided by Google's algorithm which uses the patented page rank technology to rate the web pages. This sounds simple in theory but the complexity and scale of the internet is a major factor. Google's crawlers now scour the vast internet indexing page after page and classifying and summarizing them for easy retrieval.

The Need for Optimization:

So finally, we now understand the need to optimize our websites since without it our website or blog would never be noticed by Google, Bing or Yahoo and even if they were, an improperly optimized page would not provide enough recognition through the search engines. Merely attracting visitors to the website is not enough, one must also ensure that they are interested customers who are willing and able to buy the goods which the website has on offer. Only then can the traffic be termed as 'quality traffic.'

The Future Scenario:

The rumor is that Google uses hundreds of factors to decide on the ranking of a web page including location of the user, his search history, preferences and more. Many factors are necessary to provide the relevant ads and service to the user. One must also remember that people have been trying since years to cheat Google of advertiser's money through black-hat SEO methods. Indulging in such methods is a waste of both the user's and the website owner's time and money since Google is expert at catching crooks who use them. Adsense represents a huge chunk of Google's profits and will continue to do so for many years to come. As time goes, Google's algorithm is only going to get stronger and more adept at identifying fake websites and copied content and only white-hat SEO methods will be of any use.


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