These days, search engine optimisation (SEO) success is basically defined by your ranking on Google and sometimes on YouTube. Yet SEO has a history that stretches back to a time before the two biggest search engines on the web, and it’s an art that continues to evolve. The evolution of SEO involves two enterprising Stanford University students, a rock and roll band and some practices that are pretty shady by today’s standards. With Google’s March 2024 Core Update cracking down on spammy, low-quality content, the evolution of both Google and SEO continues to be a symbiotic one.
Detailed guides have been written about what search engine optimisation is. But to put it simply, SEO is the process of increasing your website’s visibility by creating and publishing content that increases its visibility in search engines. When web users search for the products you sell, the services you provide or the information you specialise in, the right SEO strategy helps you appear at the top of their search results.
Google has more than 200 ranking factors, such as quality and length, which determine how high you appear in its search results for a phrase. Google’s bots are always crawling the web, looking for sites to index. Once a site is indexed, it’s in the running to rank for organic results.
SEO has undergone many changes over the years, but it remains an essential practice. Right now, the main ranking factor is the quality of the content. “Write for humans, not for bots” is the wisdom of the day as search engines hunt for relevance, readability, and user experience.
How did we get here? Let’s examine the evolution of content marketing and SEO from the early days of the Internet. Then, Anchor will examine what SEO is now and what it can do for your company.
What SEO Used To Be
The evolution of SEO started in the mid-90s. In 1994, just three years after the launch of the world’s first website, search engines Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite and Lycos launched. In 1996, students Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched Backrub, a site that ranked links based on relevancy and popularity. Backrub was destined to become Google.
The earliest use of “SEO” as a phrase can be traced back to 1997. Legend has it that the manager of the rock band Jefferson Starship made an irate phone call to Bob Heyman. Heyman was the senior vice president of audience development at the company Cybernautics, which ran the band’s website. The manager was apparently furious that several fan-created pages were outranking the band’s official website in search results.
Thanks to this story, Heyman is sometimes credited with coining the term SEO, although it was also used in 1997 when Danny Sullivan launched the website Search Engine Watch, featuring news and tips on search engine ranking.
In the early days, the secret to ranking well was just repeating keywords often enough in your webpage text and meta tags, a practice Google now penalises as “spamming”. Website owners used popular search terms in their meta keyword tags, whether they were relevant or not, leading to a lower calibre of search results. Website owners and marketers would sometimes indulge in “keyword stuffing” (excessively repeating certain keywords) or dodgy practices like placing invisible text on the webpage.
However, Google cracked down on these practices, and a big part of the evolution of SEO is the search engine stepping in to fight back against spam. In 2003, Google changed the algorithm to penalise sites that used keyword stuffing. In 2004, they cracked down on invisible text, and in 2005, they went after low-quality links. In 2011, Google’s very first ‘Panda’ update targeted thin content and low-quality sites, which led to them sinking in search results.
The Current Landscape of SEO
Although technology keeps evolving and Google continues to roll out new updates, the expression “content is king” remains as true as ever. SEO is vital for business owners, as less than 1% of searchers click through to the second page of Google. Google has over 80% of the search market share, while its closest competitor, YouTube, has more than two billion logged-in users per month. Video results are 50 times more likely to rank organically than text results alone, and 91% of companies now use video as a marketing tool.
Google is cracking down hard on low-quality and spammy content, and old-school tricks like excessive keyword use and fake reviews just won’t cut it anymore. Some tips that can help you rank in 2024 include keeping your content on topic, using a strong-featured image, creating original content, and using authentic links.
The Direction of SEO
The evolution of content marketing and SEO is being impacted by some new trends. The future of SEO is set to look more technologically advanced, more ethical and more user-friendly, largely due to the following factors:
AI/machine learning
Search engines are using artificial intelligence and machine learning to better shape user experience. Google has released its Search Generative Experience (SGE) to a limited number of users. When you search in Google, it provides an AI-powered result, some sources and a list of prompts to explore the topic in more detail. AI-driven tools can automate SEO tasks by quickly analysing data and providing recommendations.
Voice search
With smart speakers and voice-activated devices becoming more commonplace, search engines look set to focus more on voice search queries. Virtual assistants like Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa let you casually pose a question to a search engine as if it were a real person.
User experience (UX)
User experience is about improving the overall experience a web user has with your website. UX and SEO have become intertwined as increased competition forces websites to be faster, easier to use and cleaner to navigate in order to outrank their peers. In the years to come, UX will continue to be a major part of the SEO experience.
Mobile responsiveness
With more than 60% of organic searches now coming from mobile devices, Google has made mobile-first indexing its priority. Website creators will need to continue focusing on mobile responsiveness in order to rank.
E-E-A-T Principle
E-E-A-T is a concept found in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines that stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. While it’s not a new concept, it will continue to be important for marketers looking to stay on the cusp of SEO's evolution.
Why Has SEO Evolved?
Over the years, several different factors have driven the evolution of SEO: Google algorithm updates designed to combat spam, Google prioritising content based on user intent, and the rise of social media and mobile devices. Search engine optimisation has had to evolve to meet both the changing demands of users and the sometimes spammy practices of certain companies and marketers.
Google has been the main driver of changes to the SEO field, and the evolution of Google and SEO has always been about providing users with a better experience. While that evolution is an ongoing process, some essential principles remain relevant today.
Current Effective SEO Strategies with Anchor
Anchor combines the latest developments in SEO with timeless principles that have always worked. Our SEO services aren’t about optimising everything just because it’s there but about delving deep into your website to focus on strategies that are airtight and intentional. We take an integrated multidisciplinary approach that takes your whole website into account rather than a silo mentality. Despite all the focus on search engines, our content marketing is designed to engage human web users and provide them with a rewarding experience.
Drop us a line for proven SEO strategies that will keep you in a strong position long into the future.
