Search engine optimization is an attempt to get more and better quality visitors from search engines for a website without having to pay for it. Of course paying a search engine optimization expert to optimize your website for you, might in the end cost as much, if not more, than paying to have your website included in search results.

The whole concept dates back to the early days of the Internet and search engines. During the good old days of search engines like Alta Vista, it was in fact quite easy to get your website ranked high in search results. All you had to do was ‘feed’ it with the right meta tags. The right keywords, description tag and title tag had a major influence on how high your website was ranked. In those days you could build a website today and have it ranked high in Alta Vista tomorrow.

Those days are no more. Search engines soon realized that if they allowed their search results to be affected by the website owner, who had a vested interest in a high ranking, they would serve results to their visitors that were often irrelevant to what they were looking for. So search engines changed the formulas they used to rank websites to make it more difficult to be manipulated.

One of the very first search engines that used the number of incoming links to a website as a measure of it’s popularity and therefore to determine its ranking in search results, was Inktomi. Google soon followed with a patented system that did not simply count links, but also gave a higher value to some links than others when they ranked websites.

Once again web developers started abusing the system with so-called link farms and link pages where a website owner could simply buy thousands of incoming links to artificially improve the ranking of his website. Link spamming on blogs and forums also contributed to the debasement of the whole system.

This resulted in the development of the nofollow tag. This tag instructs search engine robots not to count such a link in favor of a website when encountered. Theoretically at least it should also not penalize the website linked to. Many forums and blogs now use this tag in links on their pages.

Google has since published an extensive manual where it explains to webmasters what they should be looking at if they want a good ranking in Google’s search results. Topics covered are guidelines for design and content, technical guidelines and quality guidelines that if followed will ensure a positive effect on your website’s ranking.

Search engine optimization has therefore evolved from simple techniques such as keyword manipulation and buying incoming links to where it should be – focusing on quality. Not only quality and relevance of content, but also quality in layout and error-free HTML

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