Search engine optimization: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 10:00, 8 July 2010

Revision as of 01:40, 9 July 2010

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== History ==

[[Webmaster]]s and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early [[World Wide Web|Web]]. Initially, all a webmasterwebmasters needed to do was submit the address of a page, or [[Uniform Resource Locator|URL]], to the various engines which would send a "[[Web crawler|spider]]" to "crawl" that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be [[Index (search engine)|indexed]].<ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.webir.org/resources/phd/pinkerton_2000.pdf| format =PDF | title=Finding What People Want: Experiences with the WebCrawler|accessdate=2007-05-07| publisher=The Second International WWW Conference Chicago, USA, October 17–20, 1994|author=Brian Pinkerton}}</ref> The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server, where a second program, known as an [[search engine indexing|indexer]], extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

Site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, creating an opportunity for both [[white hat]] and [[black hat]] SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst [[Danny Sullivan (technologist)|Danny Sullivan]], the phrase "search engine optimization" probably came into use in 1997.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showpost.php?p=2119&postcount=10|title=Who Invented the Term "Search Engine Optimization"?|author=Danny Sullivan|publisher=[[Search Engine Watch]]|date=June 14, 2004|accessdate=2007-05-14}} See [http://groups.google.com/group/alt.current-events.net-abuse.spam/browse_thread/thread/6fee2777dc17b8ab/3858bff94e56aff3?lnk=st&q=%22search+engine+optimization%22&rnum=1#3858bff94e56aff3 Google groups thread].</ref>