Many business owners will here hear the phrase ‘search engine optimisation’ (or SEO) from friends in the business community or even competitors and may consider it as a route to increasing sales, but what is SEO? Alternatively, a business owner may have tried ‘by link services’ in the past and found it either didn’t work as well as expected or was working, but no longer as effective – this article explains what SEO is, and why ‘new’ SEO is working better than ever.

I have been working in search engine optimisation and ranking website market, before it was even called SEO. Here are the changes in SEO since the start of the new millennium and what you should be looking for in the SEO services that your SEO Agency offers or provides.

Back at the start of the Millennium the ‘big’ search engines that most people were using were Lycos and Excite. Of course, back then a very small percentage of the UK population had access to the internet and those that did had a slow ‘dial-up’ system.

Websites were one or two pages with basic information to allow them to load quickly (within 20 seconds). SEO practices back then were to ‘hide’ as many keywords on a page as possible, so the website was found for those searches without making the page look to spammy for visitors.

In 2002 Google launched something called ‘AdWords’ and it was predicted to be the death of SEO, as people could pay for prominence, on the now the number 1 website for starting internet searches.

In 2003, Yahoo purchased Inktomi, AltaVista and FAST, which was basically the end of all of the ‘smaller’ search engines. Google started to stamp down on ‘spam’ practices and websites. At the same time Google realised that ‘AdWords’ were not going to kill off SEO and that in fact the ‘natural listings’ encouraged visitors back to their search engine platform. Google started to recognise ‘professional SEO’ experts and promoted good SEO rather than spamming SEO.

2004 saw the first website ‘banned’ from the internet as Google took action against websites that were spamming them. They also took legal action against the “SEO Company” responsible.

To rank a website in 2006 you just needed links back to your website and so buying links / link exchange was all the rage and most websites had a web page where they would list companies and links to their website (I am still amazed how many websites continue this practice).

Between 2004 and 2008 Google, now was the only real “player” in the search engine world, started taking action against poor linking practices and companies and started tightening up on spam and buying links. The ‘Noughties” ended with all “naughty” SEO practices being practically stamped out, as Google concentrated on ranking websites based on their content and it’s relevance to the search being carried out.

Between 2010 and 2015 we started to see the search engines take notice of ‘Social Media’ sites and soon the results were filled with Twitter ‘tweets’ in the results. (I can still see the face of one of my customers when searching Google for his business, and the whole first page of the search results were compiled of tweets of a Twitter conversation that two members of staff had been having about how terrible the company was!)

Google introduced “personal search results” with the websites shown in the search results based on your previous searches and websites you had visited before. This caused a ‘bit of a stir’ in the SEO world as customers claimed their websites were “top of Google” for any search they did related to their industry, just because they had visited their own website many times before, so Google of course fed them back the website for all relevant searches. This can still be a bit of an issue until you show them the new ‘Google Incognito search’.

The focus on ranking websites was on being found for BIG keywords. A ‘Plumber’ in Bristol would want to rank for that search, and so that was the focus.

Google ‘Panda’ and ‘Penguin’ updates figuratively killed off ‘link exchanges’ with huge penalties for websites who had irrelevant links pointing towards them. At the same time Google introduced “no follow links” to allow websites to provide relevant links to other websites and information without penalising either party. It was the start of “safe linking”. Quality and relevant content was now the key to ranking in the search engines.