The British scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, is accredited for the invention of WWW (World Wide Web) in 1989 while he was working at CERN. This might have people arguing that the origins of SEO dates back to 1991 with the launch of the first website.
However, to be honest SEO’s history can be dated back to 1997 when it was still considered a very new concept. Since then, well over two decades have passed, and now SEO is more or less considered a lifestyle.
When we talk about SEO (search engine optimization), it is evident that studying how the search engines themselves evolved is a given. According to a study by Search Engine Journal, in the 1900s search engine landscape was highly competitive with AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, and Yahoo.
Yahoo was created in 1994 by Stanford University students Jerry Wang and David Filo, and it was in 1996 that Larry Page and Sergey Brin built Backrub which ultimately became Google.
Today with over 4.66 billion internet users, three billion smartphone users, and over 3.6 billion social media users, the world has become populated on the digital landscape. There is no doubt that even today, search engines and SEO still play a crucial part in the current ecosystem and are genuinely the digital world’s legacy.
Legacy and SEO
When we talk about legacy, it refers to what is inherited by future generations. Considering that search engine optimization has been around for 24 years, it makes complete sense that this actually what the future of digital technology that has yet to come will inherit.
With over a billion websites whatever technology the future holds would definitely have its work cut out because of the foundation laid by search engines.
Hence if we are looking for a technology that would revolutionize how we operate on the World Wide Web today, it will definitely use this legacy system to build a new system. Too much time, effort, money, and data have been already invested by businesses, corporations, establishments, governments, and users. This is why negating all of this would be erroneous.
Nearly 1,200 petabytes of data have been estimated to be shared and stored by big companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. In order to truly understand the extent and gravity of the previous statement, that is 1.2 million terabytes we are talking about.
All of this translates to 1.2 billion gigabytes, but that is only the big five we are talking about excluding Apple. Hence one can imagine just how big the internet has become since 1990.
It Takes Time to Build a Legacy
Apart from PPC, SEO is known as organic because it uses organic methods and strategies used to obtain high rankings on search engines. This includes:
- Creation of content on-site and off-site.
- Focusing on topic clusters and usage of keywords.
- Developing a diverse backlink portfolio that directs towards your website or landing pages.
- Implementing Technical SEO that involves optimizing your website for crawling and indexing phase.
- Improving your website’s loading speed along with user navigation, user interface, and user experience.
- Creating original and information-rich content.
- Alt text and Meta descriptions while avoiding keyword stuffing.
As you can see, this is an exhaustive process that leads to no presumable end. Even if one is optimistic, organic SEO can take as little as six months to show signs of improvement on SERPs (search engine result pages) while it can stretch over to a couple of years or more to show marked progress.
See how a company has compared their SEO expenses with revenue.
Just like building a legacy, SEO takes time.
Legacy Lasts Longer
However, it is essential to know that organic SEO, while it takes time and is exhaustive, produces many longer-lived results than paid SEO. This is because, with organic SEO, much of the time and effort invested goes in reputation management that involves consistent effort and dedication towards generating organic content for benefiting users, both on-site and off-site.
As time passes by, you will begin to accumulate valuable backlinks from different websites as well as generate more traffic for your more popular landing pages. In comparison, paid SEO such as PPC (pay-per-click) that falls into the SEM domain (search engine marketing) produces short lived results but increases traffic rapidly for a limited time period.
This can be explained correctly using the analogy of the tortoise and the hare race, where paid promotion is the hare and SEO is the tortoise. In the end, the slow and steady wins the race.
It Will Brings You to the Peak
One of the primary reasons why SEO is preferred is that it holds an endless potential to bring traffic and yield incredible results. The hard work that goes into implementing organic means of SEO grants you the ability to get traffic to your online store and website for free. Google has been relentlessly improving their algorithms and carrying out maneuvers to retain user trust on search engines. These include the likes of:
- Google Panda (2011) targeting low-quality sites, thin sites, and content farms.
- Google Penguin (2012) combating Grey Hat SEM and those who were violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
- Google Hummingbird (2013) more significant emphasis on natural language queries, considering context, and meaning over keywords.
- Google Pigeon (2014) increase the ranking of local listing in search and results based on user location.
- Google PageRank (patents expired, 2019) measuring the importance of website pages.
- TrustRank – an algorithm that conducts link analysis to separate useful webpage from spam.
- VisualRank – application of PageRank to image-search.
All of these updates and improvements in algorithms are used to develop users’ trust without which search engines and search engine companies can potentially lose all of their value. And this is precisely why organic SEO matters since once your SEO enables you to reach the peak.
It will help you stay there for a more extended period of time. Pupils seeking experts to request them to write my assignment UK should also consider services that rank highest on search engines.
The Legacy of SEO
The legacy of SEO can be observed through the benefits it has to offer:
- Creation of high quality, original content that is valuable for users and helps generate traffic online.
- Bring in quality traffic for your website that is genuinely interested and having buying power and decision-making ability.
- Ongoing optimization and testing allow for surpassing rivals and moving ahead of the competition.
- Generating trust, credibility, public rapport, and authenticity for your brands and businesses.
- Stringent search engine algorithms and White Hat SEO practices make sure the user experience is maintained, and quality of content doesn’t suffer.
- Continuous and consistent reporting and analysis provide opportunities for non-stop improvement.
Conclusion
To think SEO is a onetime deal is to be gravely mistaken. SEO is a continuous and ongoing process; however, the results once achieved, provide benefits that can reap for a longer time. Google is now handling things and upgrading its algorithms. A lot of preference is being given to user and search intent alongside providing the most useful and valuable results for online users and their search queries.
As an SEO specialist, you should always consider updating your outdated content and making sure that the quality of content you create to uplift ranking can rival and succeed your competitors. Therefore, SEO is a never-ending process though it gives you time to rethink your strategy and implement improvements as such its legacy continues to still live to this day.
Author Bio
Samantha Kaylee currently works as an Assistant Editor at Crowd Writer. This is where higher education students can ask professionals to do my coursework for me to acquire specialized assistance for their subjects and topics. During her free time, she likes to indulge in pop culture and binge-watch TV series online.
Samantha Kaylee
Samantha Kaylee currently works as an Assistant Editor at Crowd Writer. This is where higher education students can ask professionals to do my coursework for me to acquire specialized assistance for their subjects and topics. During her free time, she likes to indulge in pop culture and binge-watch TV series online.