Small Business SEO - Small Business SMO

The web started out as a single web page in 1990. As more web servers and web pages sprang up, Mosaic and later Netscape became the first browsers that would let everyone be able to ’see; webpages as they were available for every type of desktop configuration. Bear in mind this was in 1993, a full three years after the first ‘webpage’ was put up.

Soon after the first ’spider’ was developed and did little more than collect urls, but paved the way for others to create programs that used word associations to search document collections.

Then In 1994 a bunch of Standford students created the search engine Yahoo, which was the first to assign hierarchical status to each document in their directory based upon the “search parameters”.

Search engines and their spiders proliferated without too much distinguishing traits, except for the fact the full text from pages and even user feedback could now be indexed and used in the search results to determine relevancy.

Then Google was born. Or rather started by Larry Page (who invented PageRank while at Standford University) and was used as the official search engine of Standford University.

Google indexed pages much differently from the competition and had a drive for maximum usability and relevance. They didn’t flood their sites with text, banners, and ads. Nor did they include sponsored results inside the organic results.

By this time it is 2003, and Google not only had the lion’s share plus some of the world ’search’ market, but they also licensed their algorithm to other search engines.

So this is why Google is the king of search, at least as of writing this in early 2008.

The only difference between 2008 and 2003 is that Yahoo and MSN have stopped using the Google algorithm and have started their own. Too little, too late.

Search Results

What you see when you go to any search engine and search for anything is the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

This is a mix, in one way or the other, of organic (natural) listings for the search term and sponsored results for the search term.

Without the sponsored results, search engines could not turn a profit.

Basically web spiders crawl from page to page through links and index the content and details of each page and assign it a score based on different criteria. Then when a user searches using a keyword, the hierarchical results are displayed along with the ads or sponsored results. They might be mixed together, or they might be kept somewhat separate (as in Google’s case)

This brings us to where we are presently at in the History of Search Engines

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