What is Search Engine Optimization? Origin and history

What is Search Engine Optimization

Suppose you are a librarian, not a librarian of any ordinary library, but a librarian of all the books in the world. You have all the books in the world.

All the people of the world need books of their choice, they know that you have the collection of all the books. So they come to you for their favorite book. What do you do as a librarian? How to organize so many books? So that easily find where you put any book? There needs to be a system/rule for this, right?

Also Read: What is Google Analytics ? What is the function of Google Analytics?

Yes, these systems or rules are created by search engines (like Google, Bing etc.). These search engines are the librarians of the Internet. They organize all the data in such a way that it is easy to find later. Each search engine has its own set of rules, called algorithms. Search engines collect all their data through this algorithm.

If you are a website owner, getting your results to show up in search engines is a big deal. Every website wants their website to rank in Google. Because the higher you rank in Google, the more visitors you are likely to get.

But Google won’t show you at the top of the search engine anymore, right? Google will only show your website when it thinks the ingredients on your website are necessary for their recipe. It means you have to have resources on your website. Whichever number of elements is better, Google will prioritize it first. And this is called SEO or Search Engine Optimization.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization is the practice of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to a website through organic search engine results.

SEO is a method of optimizing a website, both the website and the content, so that your website appears in the best possible position in search engines through organic means.

All of them are the companies that work the most with search engine optimization. Moz, Erefs, Backlinko, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land all research how SEO works. All of them have only SEO related posts on their own blogs.

History of Search Engine Optimization

Some content writers and webmasters (meaning those who maintain websites) may have started optimizing some websites for search engines since the mid-1990s. Although now they don’t have to get so much speed to do SEO like nowadays. Back then, webmasters only had to submit their website address and any specific web pages they wanted to optimize.

After that the web crawler of all those search engines started crawling. Even then all these crawlers used to store the links separately. After that, after crawling, the search engines would index all the necessary information in their own index. Back then, the search engines basically kept track of how many words are in your content, from where your content was uploaded (location), how many specific words are there, and how many links are attached to the web page, all these information.

In the 1990s, website owners realized the value of search engines. Few realized at the time that this was going to be the future of driving visitors to their web site. So they created whaty hat and black hat SEO. According to Danny Sullivan, an American technology journalist, the term search engine optimization was first used around 1997. According to him, the personality behind popularizing SEO is ‘Bruce Clay’.

The most popular search engines at that time were Alvista and Infosys. Alvista was founded around 1995 and Infsic was born a year before that – that is, during 1994 by Steve Kirsch.

How do search engines work?

Each search engine has its own algorithm. Neither you nor we can finish writing all these search engine algorithms, because they have millions of algorithms for how best to rank a post in search engines. The best we can do is to see what Google is doing to rank someone’s website.

Their direct information from Google – ‘How Search Engines Work’

Search algorithms look at many factors such as number of words, usability and relevance of pages, type of sources or reliability, location and settings etc. There is a good chance that these algorithms will change again depending on the type of search you are doing. For example, ‘current news’ plays a more effective role than recently updated or recently uploaded content, compared to the dictionary definition.

Google says their search engine tracks this the most – at least for web searches. Because Google’s algorithm is the most reliable till date. Apart from Google, there are many search engines. But Google is considered more reliable by everyone.

What is search engine traffic?

All the results that come after searching in search engines, clicking on all those results and entering any website is called search engine traffic. That is, one click is one visitor, multiple clicks are multiple visitors or multiple traffic.

Hearing the sound of traffic, another word comes to everyone’s mind. And that is the word jam. There are very few people who have never heard the word traffic jam as a child. There are reasons for this conclusion. Traffic jams happen not only in real life but also online. Due to this online traffic jam, the server is down, as it happens during public examination results in our country. Everyone rushes in around noon, and the server goes down. However, there are many other reasons for server down. This is one of many reasons.

Why everyone wants to do SEO on the website?

Search engine optimization is the place to collect a reliable qualified audience. Where once someone gets an opportunity, the audience keeps coming to their website for a long time. And this whole process is free. So all the website owners after building the complete website, their first goal is to set how they will do the SEO of the website.

Besides, there are some other reasons worth mentioning. They are-

Free traffic

The biggest advantage of search engine optimization is that it gets traffic for free. Once you can convince the search engines that the ingredients they need for their recipe are on your website, Google will send traffic directly to you at no charge. In this case you have to spend time and develop the website as Google or search engines want. That is, if you know SEO or know how to optimize the website, then you can bring traffic directly from Google to your website. at no cost. All digital marketing methods except SEO are paid.

Once the traffic starts coming, it lasts for a long time

If you’ve boosted your website, you’ll see the audience come in as long as you run your campaign. More than that don’t come much, unless they absolutely need it.

Now the advantage of SEO is, if you can optimize both your content and website nicely, then the traffic you get from search engines will be pure, lasting for a long time. This will increase the prominence of your website in search engines.

Direct Google User Audience is available

Audience is a big deal in digital marketing. If this audience is fickle then your campaign will not be successful. I am coming to the main point – without saying a little before that. Many people have done or will run ads on Facebook, then you will notice one thing – you can target the audience according to people’s interests. For example – someone likes music. If you select music of interest and post music related posts, it will reach the targeted audience. Let’s say you sell Spotify Premium. Then you will see that your campaign will be successful and you will be able to reach the people you want.

Trying to say, audience does matter. It all depends on the audience. Now suppose someone likes music. You target interest in those who play football. As a result your campaign will not be successful. Because you cannot reach your target audience. Football interested audience will come to music add.

This is a paid campaign. Where you can select your almost audience if you want. But in case of SEO you don’t have to select the audience separately. Because search engines know what kind of audience to send you. Their intelligent algorithm will automatically send the audience for you.

Who is this audience?

Suppose someone directly wants to know what ‘Spotify’ is. When he searches on search engines, search engines will show him Spotify related posts. That means he’s looking for exactly Spotify. If your website has ingredients for Spotify related keywords then Google will make you part of their recipe.

Google will rank you first as a result. And the person who searches for Spotify, surely needs Spotify and nothing else. When he first sees your post on Google and then he becomes your audience/visitor. Then your audience is meeting enough standards. No type of audience is coming outside of the targeted keywords.

Now if you want to sell Spotify Premium, you can sell it very successfully. Because visitors from search engines are not targeted. Which happens – in the case of social media marketing. People out of interest there become your visitors. Which is not really effective. So there is no substitute for search engines to get the best quality audience/visitors.