Monday, January 25, 2010

How SEO Began?

By July Utley

Web masters which are usually the website owners, as well as content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, at first this simply intended you create a website, checked it for spelling errors and then submit it to search engines to be cataloged. It is much like a self service library might be run. This was the beginning of the World Wide Web.

When a webmaster or the owner of the website had submitted a page, or URL, to the a variety of engines they would send a spider to "crawl" that page, take out links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed.

The process has now evolved so that a Search Engine Spider downloads a target page and keeps it on the Search Engine's own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, breaks down the information, extracts a range of elements that compose the page, such as the words it contains, the coding information, META tags, description, title, keywords, link text, and where these are located, and any weight or added significance for specific words as well and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date. The Indexer then provide every element a value according to the search engine algorithm, the mathematical formula used to verify the overall importance of the website in regard to definite search terms.

As site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results webmasters began to try ways to influence the Search Engines. This was the birth of SEO, Search Engine Optimization. As more users began to search for goods and services online, it was possible to track how the search results were used. It became evident that searchers would not often go through many pages of results to find what they wanted. The competition for those high search results became more intense and SEO became and remains vital to website promotion.

While they were graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed "backrub", a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links. This means that some links are stronger than others, or give more weight to the PageRank because the contents of the page are more likely to be relevant to the searcher.

It was in 1998 that the grad students founded Google. Among internet users, Google attracted loyal followers who liked the outcome their produced system. And PageRank and hyper link analysis which are Off-page factors are considered, in order to permit Google to keep away from the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only on-page factors for their rankings. Web masters went to work using link building schemes to manipulate search results to their favor although PageRank was more complex. Web masters are really focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. However, some of these methods, or link farms, involved the creation of thousands of sites for the lone purpose of link spamming.

In order to counter the unfavorable impact of link schemes, as of 2007, search engines again had to evolve to consider a wider range of undisclosed factors for their ranking algorithms. Google has since disclosed that it now uses more than 200 different elements to rank pages. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's Live Search, are the three leading search engines that closely guard the algorithms they use to rank pages. - 16890

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