So here we will give you a brief history of search engine optimisation. Most people today think that SEO all started with the worlds most powerful search engine. However it was not actually the mighty Google but an American engineer called Vannevar Bush. He was at the top of his game and was the head of America’s Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War 2. Bush was involved in various projects of importance and was the man that initiated the atomic bomb Manhattan Project, and was a co-founder of the USA defence contractor Raytheon.
Bush has been a successful inventor of various things. Quite possibly his most important is Memex which he saw as “a device in which individuals would compress and store all of their books, records, and communications, mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.” The memex would provide an “enlarged intimate supplement to one’s memory”. Memex was extremely influencial in the development of the earlier hypertext systems which eventually lead to the creation of the Internet and personal knowledge base software. His paper is also renowned for the prediction of various other items of significance such as PC’s and quite possibly the most important of all – the Internet.
The invention of the internet then lead to the introduction of robots or “bots” being used to crawl the internet and collect and store important data. The organisation of this data is what lead to the birth of search engines. Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched Google in 1998 and the rest as they say is history!
Phase one of Google was a shambles. However, even in it’s infancy it was the most powerful search engine out there. This is where optimisation or SEO as we know it today began. In these early days there wasn’t such an art to it. Google’s system was so easy to manipulate as their algorithm was simple to grasp. Ranking was not difficult. You could use simple techniques like basic link building and target your keywords by simply repeating a keyword over and over, which is referred to nowadays as keyword stuffing. A technique we might add that will get you nowhere in this day and age. These simple factors would rocket you to the top of Google.
It wasn’t long before Google realised that things had to change and from 2003 they began to introduce regular algorithm updates. They would create new factors and websites would be penalised for using the techniques that they no longer saw as “ethical”. Anybody that was looking to manipulate the search engine results unfairly would see their website plummet down the google listings.
So the world of SEO is now a complex beast. As an SEO Agency we have to keep on top of the Google algorithm updates and ensure that our clients are never penalised. It is an ever changing world and Search Engine Optimisation is evolving with it!
