What is Search Engine Optimization? Origins and History Post-21
What is Search Engine Optimization? Origins and History
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 in the world need books of their choice, they know that you have all the books in your collection. So they come to you for the books of their choice. What do you do as a librarian? How do you organize so many books? So that you can easily find where you have kept any book? A system/rule is needed for this, right?
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 can be easily found later. Every search engine has its own rules, which are called algorithms. Search engines collect all their data through this algorithm.
If you are a website owner, then showing your results in search engines is a big deal. Every website owner wants their website to rank in Google. Because the higher you rank on Google, the more visitors you are likely to get. But Google won’t just show you at the top of the search engine, right? Google will only show your website when it thinks that all the elements on your website are needed for their recipe. This means that your website must have resources. Google will prioritize the one with the best number of elements. And this is called SEO or 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.
-Moz.com/ Wikipedia/ ahrefs/ backlinko
SEO is the process of improving your website to increase its visibility in relevant searches.
search engine land
SEO is a method of optimizing a website, both the website and the content, so that your website appears in the best position in search engines organically.
search engine journal
These are all the organizations that work the most on search engine optimization. Moz, Ahrefs, Backlinko, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land all do research on how SEO works. They all post only SEO related posts on their own blogs.
Some content writers and webmasters (here meaning those who maintain websites) are believed to have started optimizing some websites for search engines since the mid-1990s. Although they did not have to be so fast to do SEO like now. At that time, webmasters only had to submit their website address and a specific web page they wanted to optimize.
After that, the web crawlers of all those search engines started crawling. Even then, these crawlers stored the links separately. After that, the search engines, after crawling, would index all the necessary information in their own index. At that time, the search engines basically kept track of how many words were in your content, where your content was uploaded from (location), how many specific words, and how many links were attached to the web page, all this information.
In the 1990s, website owners realized the value of search engines. Some people realized that this was the future of bringing visitors to their websites. So they created White 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 was ‘Bruce Clay’.
The most popular search engines at that time were Alvista and Infosearch. Alvista was founded around 1995 and Infosearch was born a year before that – in 1994 by Steve Kirsch.
How do search engines work?
Each search engine has its own algorithm. Neither you nor I can finish writing down the algorithms of all these search engines, because they have millions of algorithms for how to rank posts best in search engines. All we can do is – we can see the maximum that Google does to rank someone’s website.
Their direct information from Google – ‘How search engines work’
To give you the most useful information, Search algorithms look at many factors, including the words of your query, relevance, and usability of pages, expertise of sources, and your location and settings. The weight applied to each factor varies depending on the nature of your query – for example, the freshness of the content plays a bigger role in answering queries about current news topics than it does about dictionary definitions.
To provide the most effective information to the user, search algorithms look at many factors such as the number of words, the usability and relevance of the page, the type of sources or reliability, location and settings, etc. These algorithms are also subject to change, but it depends on the type of search you are doing. For example, especially in the case of ‘current news’, recently updated or recently uploaded content plays a more effective role than dictionary definitions.
Google says that their search engine follows this thing the most – at least for web searches. Because Google’s algorithm is the most reliable so far. There are many search engines besides Google. However, everyone considers Google to be more reliable.
What is search engine traffic?
Search engine traffic is the result of clicking on a website after searching on search engines. That is, one click means one visitor, multiple clicks mean multiple visitors or multiple traffic.
When we hear the word traffic, another word comes to mind. And that is the word jam. There are very few people who have not heard the word traffic jam in their childhood. There is a reason for this definition. Traffic jams do not only happen in real life, they also happen online. Due to this online traffic jam, the server goes down, as happens when the results of public exams are declared in our country. Everyone goes around noon, and the server goes down. Of course, there are many other reasons for the server to go down. This is one of the many reasons.
Why does everyone want to do SEO on the website?
Search engine optimization is a place to collect a reliable audience. Where once someone gets the opportunity, then the audience keeps coming to their website for a long time. And this whole method is free. So after building the entire website, the first goal of all website owners is how to set up the SEO of the website.
Apart from this, 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 all the ingredients they need for their recipe are on your website, then Google will send traffic directly to you without any charge. In this case, you have to spend time and build the website the way Google or search engines want. That is, if you know SEO or know how to optimize a website, then you can bring traffic directly from Google to your website. Without any cost. Except for SEO, all the other digital marketing methods are paid.
Once traffic starts coming, it lasts for a long time
If you boost your website, you will see that the audience will come as long as you run your campaign. More than that, but not much, unless they have a specific need.
Now the advantage of SEO is that if you can optimize both your content and website well, the traffic you get from search engines will be absolutely pure and will last for a long time. This will increase the prominence of your website in search engines.
Audience is a huge thing in digital marketing. If this audience is upside down, then your campaign will not be successful. I am coming to the main point – I have not said anything before that. Many people have run ads on Facebook or will do so, then you will notice one thing – if you want, you can target the audience according to people’s interests. For example, someone’s favorite music. If you select music in interest and post music related posts, it will reach the targeted audience. Suppose 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.
What I am trying to say is, audience does matter. Everything depends on what kind of audience it will be. Now suppose someone likes music. You target those who play football in interest. As a result, your campaign will not be successful. Because you will not be able to reach your targeted audience. Football interested audience will come in music ads.
This is a paid campaign. Where you can select your almost audience if you want. But in the case of SEO, you do not have to select a separate audience. Because search engines know what kind of audience you should send. Their intelligent algorithm will automatically send you an audience.
Suppose someone wants to know what ‘Spotify’ is. When he searches on the search engine, the search engines will show him Spotify related posts. That means he is looking for Spotify exactly. If your website has ingredients for Spotify related keywords, then Google will make you part of their recipe. As a result, Google will rank you first. And the person who searches Spotify, he definitely needs Spotify and nothing else. When he sees your post on Google first and then he becomes your audience/visitor. Then your audience is quite standard. No type of audience is coming outside the targeted keywords.
Now if you want to sell Spotify Premium, then you can sell it very successfully. Because the visitors from search engines are not outside the target. Which happens in the case of social
