The history behind search engine optimization

Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, has been used since the end of the last millennium and has continued to evolve since then. In the past, for example, it was much easier to get content to the top of the rankings, as the algorithms were easy to understand. This is exactly what is more difficult today.
You can find out how search engine optimization has developed throughout the history of search engines here.

Lycos and Yahoo! set the starting signal

In 1994, Lycos and Yahoo! began their service and differed from other search engines for the first time in that Lycos also highlighted word frequencies of certain search terms and took note of words similar to search terms. Yahoo!, on the other hand, provided the first categorization that you can still find in other search engines today.

The first commercial search engine

AltaVista was the first commercial search engine to come to life in 1995 and became one of the market leaders in the search engine sector thanks to the robot called „Scooter“. This was mainly due to its high performance.

Search engines became increasingly popular

In 1996, AltaVista and InfoSeek in particular managed to lay the foundations for today's user surfing behavior as search engines. Since then, they have been used more and more frequently to help users find their way around the Internet. From entertaining sites to serious topics and interesting articles, users use AltaVista and InfoSeek to search for everything they can think of.

Google and Yahoo! dominate the market

In 1999, Google and Yahoo! dominated the market and the first SEO conference called „Search Engine Strategies“ was held in the same year. In the following years, there were more and more new functions. For example, Google introduced the Google Tool Bar in 2000 and indexing became increasingly sophisticated from 2001 at the latest, which always required new strategies. Adwords and Google's Page Rank followed in 2002 and Google's internal blog page in 2003. In 2004, paid links became increasingly important and, not least with the introduction of Analytics in 2005, the „no follow“ attribute made search engine optimization increasingly difficult.

Google is becoming more and more attractive

Google is slowly but surely gaining the upper hand as a search engine: Google buys YouTube in 2006 and the revised user interface follows just one year later. Users are now able to filter search results by news, videos and images and these functions are constantly being expanded. Social media also became increasingly popular for search engine optimization in 2008 and was usefully supplemented by guest blogging a year later.

SEO: quality pays off

In 2010, Google introduces further functions for more precise searches and now also protects users by filtering search results with low quality or dubious content. Although this makes the creation of SEO texts increasingly tricky, the quality of texts and page content is more important than ever.

Which milestones did you find particularly significant?