Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about optimizing and modifying your website for automated search engines, like Google or Bing. The main aim of SEO is to increase website’s traffic by optimizing its code, content and backlink profile to increase the website’s visibility in search results.
Simple enough, right? Not really…
The concept and the need for search engine optimization started as a response to the overwhelming rise of automated search engines. In the beginning, all web directories were edited manually.
1994 one of the first automated search engine was JumpStation, then Yahoo Search, and Lycos. Few years later, Google started a new chapter in web indexing and search technology and quickly became the most widely used search engine worldwide.
As it turns out, people are always looking for something.
With the stratospheric rise of search engine usage, businesses quickly figured out that they need to do something if they want to stay relevant in the search results for specific keywords or phrases.
Since search engines were automated and based on secretive code and calculations to display search results, there had to be a way to ‘hack’ (the most dreaded word in SEO, and simultaneously also the most attractive) the search results somehow.
This is how the search engine optimization wars had begun.
The fierce competition for the top rankings gave birth to a whole new industry and entirely new professions, such as SEO and SEM experts.
Today, there are almost 2 billion websites and Google captures about 70% of global searches and around 85% of mobile searches. That is a huge chuck of the search market. The other major search engines trying to compete with Google are: Bing, Yahoo Search, Baidu (mostly in Asia), and Ask.com.
The complexity of search engine optimization
Needless to say the search engine optimization process today is a lot different than it was in the beginning. It is a much more complex process. As search engine technology improved, the SEO’s had to adapt to the new changes and new technological challenges.
In the case of SEO, this is easier said then done. Google changes it’s search and ranking algorithm few hundred times a year! Some of those changes are very small and almost insignificant but there are also big changes that can reshuffle the search index and rankings.
What many professional SEOs experience is that things that work today, might not work a week or a month from now.
It is vital that any search engine optimization done on a website is carefully planned and well executed to avoid search engine penalties for zealous over-optimization (spamming).
There will always be impatient risk takers. Some businesses and professional SEOs will try to exploit certain areas of search engine optimization to gain top rankings quickly for specific keywords.
From my experience the effects of such optimization work are short-lived and the penalties can take many months or even years to recover from. I’ve seen businesses rank no.1 on Google for a week and then completely disappear from the search results.
Nothing new, this industry is overflowing with such tragic examples.
Today one thing is certain, the SEO game has changed. Old tricks don’t work anymore, even though there are still many SEO’s that are ready to attest the opposite.
The truth is that it’s a lot harder to fool today’s AI search and indexing algorithms and it pays to play by the rules and follow Google’s SEO guidelines.
More importantly, if the SEO is done correctly there is absolutely no need to resort to any tricks. Instead, it is better to focus on creating a website that is future-proof and outside of any Google future penalties.
SEO – The true value of optimizing your website
You may be asking yourself right about now, what is the point of spending money on search engine optimizations if Google and other search engines update their algorithms and all optimization work can actually do more harm than good.
Why even bother with SEO?
The true value of SEO lies in its wide approach in making a website faster, better and easier to understand for search engines and end-users. This is really the key objective of every professional SEO.
This is also the objective of every web manager that would oversee all SEO and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) efforts. Read this website manager job description to find out more about the multiple tasks of professional website manager.
In most companies, search engine optimization is usually placed within the marketing division, even though it is a lot more technical than general marketing.
The SEO specialists need to know web marketing, as well as technical aspects of web design, web development and the technicalities of search engine rankings. Therefore, it is not uncommon for the SEOs to become the bridge between the technical development team and the marketing team.
Unfortunately, in many companies the above-mentioned SEO team bridge is often under-appreciated and underutilized.