Search Engine Optimisation 101 – Part 1: What is Optimisation?

This Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) 101 Series is going to delve into the topic of SEO from the very beginning, to give you a solid foundation on which to build your SEO understanding.

How SEO Works

To understand how website search engine optimisation works you have to understand how a search engine operates. A search engine is basically a listing of all the websites in the world and their attributes. This makes sense when you think about the fact that a search engine has to know about your website before it can show it up in the results!

To get this listing together, spiders or ‘crawlers’, prowl around the web looking for relevant information. When they discover it, they ‘index’ it; ie: put it on their list. Then they use the information that they have indexed to decide what to show when someone looks for websites on a particular topic.

Where Search Engine Marketing Began

In 1994, a guy called Brian Pinkerton created the first ‘crawler’ – now known as spiders. The world didn’t catch on straight away.

These very first search engines were actually edited by humans! All that was required for a search engine to show a website was for the builder of the website to submit the URL to the search engine. The crawler would go and look at the page and then submit it to the site. The owner of the page decided on the information that helped get it ranked.

In 1998, Google was born. Google was revolutionary because it ranked websites on how likely it was that a random searcher would end up at a particular page if they weren’t using a search engine. Pages than had a lot of other websites linking in to them (sending people to their page) were ranked highly for this reason. This was known as ‘Page Rank’ and is still important today.

Search engine optimisation specialists spent the next decade focussed primarily on improving ‘page rank’ by creating false websites that would link to the real website, thereby fooling Google into thinking that the original website was important. This is called back-linking.

They also created articles for these sites full of the necessary keywords, known as ‘keyword stuffing’. It was fairly easy to ‘game’ the system if you knew what tools you needed.

Where SEO Is Now

In the past three years, Google has released an updated version of their search engine every single year, targeting bad practices like duplicating content, manipulative techniques like back-linking and attempting to make search results more relevant. Search engine optimisation experts are less sure as to what makes a website rank than ever before but it definitely involves social media, relevant and helpful content and quality website design.

Throughout all of this development, there’s one part of search engine marketing that hasn’t change very much, even if the way they’ve been used has changed significantly. We’re talking about the importance of keywords. Keywords are vital to success in search engine rankings because they are the link that the search engine uses to understand what it is the searcher wants and what it is you (the website) are offering.

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