My little SEO

It seems like everyone is practising a little search-engine optimisation (SEO) these days. While you might have the basics covered, do you know where SEO is heading? I’ve been optimising websites for search engines since the late 1990s and this has given me the fortunate opportunity to witness the evolution of search-engine algorithms over the years. Based on this experience, this article attempts to offer some insight on where SEO is moving.

The evolution of SEO has been an interesting one. The term was first coined in 1997, but the intentions behind it have been practised since the early days of web search; one could argue as far back as Jumpstation or even Archie in the early 1990s.

SEO is defined by Wikipedia as: “The process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via ‘natural’ (’organic’ or ‘algorithmic[SB1]’) search results for targeted keywords.” When performed successfully, SEO can tap into the tremendous number of searches performed on a daily basis and deliver a considerable stream of traffic and revenue to a website owner.

It is this potential for huge reward that has meant that search engines have had to grow smarter over the years. The early search engines were so primitive that the first phase in the life of SEO began with on-page optimisation. Quite simply, webmasters could tweak the content and various elements of their web pages or documents and, in doing so, be relatively confident of ranking well on their chosen keywords and phrases. I say words and phrases because 15 years ago, one-word searches were commonplace. These days, as users have evolved, the average query length tends to be up to three or four words. (...)

Rob Stokes is the founder and Group CEO of Quirk eMarketing,

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