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.

Once a web master had submitted a page, or URL, to the various engines they would send a spider to “crawl” that page, extract 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 build up a “backrub”, a search engine that depended on a mathematical algorithm to rate the importance of web pages. PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links, which is number calculated by the algorithm. This simply means that some links are stronger compared to others, or give more weight to the PageRank as the contents of the page are more likely to be related to the searcher.

The grad students founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a faithful following among Internet users, who liked the outcome their produced system. Off-page factors such as PageRank and hyper link analysis were taken into account, as well as on-page factors, to allow Google to keep away from the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more complex, web masters went to work using link building schemes to control search results to their favor. Web masters are paying attention on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, involved the creation of thousands of sites for the single purpose of link spamming.

To counter the adverse 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. The three leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Live Search, closely guard the algorithms they use to rank pages.

July Utley, Freelance Writer. We are committed to providing free helpful information about the History of SEO, Search Engine Optimization, and how the Search Engine Spider works. For more information about SEO, Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Spider visit http://www.hcisat.com/history-of-seo/