Topic of the Week: SEO

I've decided to research SEO - that's search engine optimisation to you (and me). I'll probably touch on SEM (search engine management, apparently, although it sounds more like management of the actual search engine - which would be Google's or Yahoo's job, surely? Anyway, I know what they mean).

Anyway, expect some posts to fly around.

But first, my take on some history.

Although I wasn't aware of it at the time, the Internet as such was born out of US defence research in the late 60s (say 1969). I may have heard of it as ARPANET or something like that in the 70s but it didn't really register. And I didn't see my first cabinet-sized modem until late 1975. It was painfully slow but usefully connected banks to central computers. It was the first hint of what was to come. However modems didn't really kick off until bulletin boards came into use in the '80s. I tried both out in around 1986 or so and could see some possibilities. I could see a use for modems, for sure. And the French caught on fast with a national network I think they called Minitel or similar. And it was about that time, or maybe 1990 at the latest that I saw the Internet running usefully at Sydney University (in text mode but able to exchange files - the first such file I saw was a graphic of the USS Enterprise, of course). So the building blocks were in place. Modems were out there getting used, the universities were churning out fresh graduates with a taste for the early Internet and early-adopter games and email systems were kicking around. There was pent up demand by 1993, and a full on explosion by 1994. Of course the clincher was the World Wide Web.

So what was SEO like in 1994? It wasn't much at all. The Internet and the Web were functional but search "engines" didn't really exist. We did searches for details held on servers, but there was little cross-referencing that I saw. What I did see were lists. And the lists grew and grew. pretty soon we had lists of lists. Coupled with early browsers and the "bookmark" function we could catalogue our lists as we found them. Primitive, I know, but the Web was a smaller place in the '90s. Out of those lists came the first search engines, and then came Altavista - the first really superior search system - and of course Yahoo. But Altavista was the hottest engine in town until Google launched with that classic no-frills look and a new algorithm that estimated popularity by counting links. Bingo. Now you could really ditch bookmarks and almost all lists - one search engine could just find the good stuff and rank it correctly most of the time.


By my personal reckoning we can say that SEO was born in about 1998, or '99 at a pinch. It was the result of those competing search engines and the new-fangled approach of ranking by linking. It's grown more sophisticated over the years as various players have tried to manipulate the search results to their own advantage - after all, everyone want to be found, don't they?