The internet, like any other technology, has evolved significantly from its emergence to the present day. In fact, one of the areas that has been most altered by this transformation is the way of doing business and how to establish a community to add value to its users. From there, SEO was born.
SEO, known as search engine optimization, is a strategy that has gained great relevance in recent years. However, in the beginning it was not considered as a necessary element. After the changes in search engine algorithms, it was seen as an essential strategy.
How was the beginning of SEO?
The term SEO had its origin in mid-1997, it was coined by John Audette and his company “Multimedia Marketing Group”. Just then, the first, extremely basic algorithms also emerged. The “meta tags”, tags in the source code, were the first elements to take into account to place a page among the main organic results returned by a search engine.
Afterwards, keywords with their respective density were the next practice that began to be relevant to search engines. From there, the “PageRank” was born in the main search engine, Google, in order to add more value to a page depending on the quantity and quality of the links.
Little by little, penalties were integrated into unlawful practices that only sought to place a website in the first places, but did not add any kind of value to the user. This is how they began to sanction websites with content plagiarism, heavy loading speed, low quality incoming and outgoing links, etc.
At that time, authentic and valuable content was positioned as the main element that algorithms considered when positioning a site among the first searches. As user behavior evolved, so did the algorithm to provide a pleasant search experience.
SEO today
Today, in 2019, SEO positioning is considered one of the main digital strategies that brands should pay attention to if they want to be among the first search results.
The algorithms now evaluate a wide variety of aspects. From valuable content, the time it takes to load items, the visit rate, the traffic attracted, the adaptation to mobile devices, to the voice searches, and many more.
Now, SEO is not only an alternative to optimize a page, it is an obligation for any website that wants to maintain an optimal reach and good visibility.