If you’re a business or website owner, chances are you’ve run across the term search engine optimization numerous times. You may even be paying a company to optimize your website for the search engines. But have you ever wondered how it all began? And how it became so essential to any business that is trying to establish a presence online, generate leads and ultimately increase sales and revenue? If you have, you’re not alone. Let’s take a brief look at the origins of SEO and why it became so important:

What is Search Engine Optimization?

In order to discover the origins of SEO, it’s important to first define exactly what it is. At its core, search engine optimization is the practice of designing and structuring a website in such a way that it ranks highly for essential "keywords" that are relevant to your business, product and services. If you’re a dentist in Charleston, for example, then your website would benefit from being optimized for keywords such as "Charleston Dentist." Why? Because whenever a person looking for the services of a dentist in Charleston searches for this keyword, if your website were optimized for that term, then your website would appear at the top of the search engine results, which would ultimately mean more visitors to your website, more leads and more revenue for your business.

How It all Began

Search engine optimization evolved by necessity as the Internet grew and took shape back in the 1990s. The first SEO efforts were fairly rudimentary and involved little more than submitting a website to the search engines. The search engines in turn would initiate a computer program called a Spider that would essentially "crawl" through the website, cataloging and storing the data it found there so that it could be included in search results. These early efforts also involved embedding keywords (otherwise known as metatags) into the code of the website to help further categorize its contents.

Unfortunately, unethical website owners and SEO companies soon learned that by spamming their websites with extraneous keywords, they could artificially manipulate their search engine rankings and gain an advantage over other websites that were playing by the rules. Fortunately, search engines soon put a stop to this in an effort to improve the end user experience.

SEO Today

Search engines today are far more advanced than in years past. They will reward business websites with high rankings if they play by the rules, but they will also severely punish those that don’t. If you want to establish a presence for your business and brand online and increase leads and revenue, then you need an SEO company that uses ethical and accepted search engine optimization techniques to promote your website and improve your rankings in the search engines.