SEO in 2007

Let me start with a brief history of search engine optimisation. In the mid-nineties, the internet in the UK was just taking off. Dial-up connections were becoming widespread and the commercial potential of the web was beginning to be realised. Alta Vista was the key search engine, but several others - MSN, Yahoo etc. - were not far behind. Keywords were all the rage and the search engines worked the only way they could - on trust. So put enough high-ranking keywords in your page title and meta data and you'd rank well. Easy. But the engines were slow and unreliable - by the late 90s the relatively few competitors for internet traffic had realised that the systems could be easily undermined, and the combination for flash graphics and low bandwidth made everything very slow indeed. SEO had become a matter of submitting a site repeatedly to each and every search engine. Something new was needed. Google, which had started quietly and obscurely, was given a big dose of funding and entered the mainstream. The big breakthrough was counting backlinks - links from other sites which linked to a particular site - in determining a site's ranking. Google was fast, relatively add-free, and it worked. Word spread like wildfire and back links started dominating SEO practice. With a back link or two on a highly-rated site, it was possible to shoot to the top of the rankings, and all that was needed to stay there was to keep exchanging links with other sites. But, as before, people got wise to these practices. Spamming of those with popular sites became commonplace and it became necessary to ban over-zealous promoters. This, among other unethical SEO techniques, required Google and the other search engines to make their algorithms more sophisticated, filtering out irrelevant results and making these unethical techniques less effective. Thus it was that around 2003 SEO companies and webmasters started to realise that the days of guaranteeing high search engine placements by building links were coming to an end. As Google and the others became more intelligent, so the SEOs had to up their game. Many had already moved in the direction of more ethical approaches and site improvement. The industry began to settle down and gradually Google cracked down on those using unscrupulous methods. It is unlikely that 2007 will see any dramatic change in search engine behaviour. Google's algorithms will become ever more sophisticated, and their near-monopoly on search engine usage will mean that they will be able to require more of websites, in terms of submitting site maps, robot.txt files etc. etc. Good news for web site owners is that the search engine spiders will become more intelligent and thus more able to spider complex, dynamic sites. For the moment, it still pays dividends to convert nasty filenames to nice ones but this will become less of an issue (although web users will still appreciate pretty URLs). But the message that is becoming ever clearer is that it is not worth trying to 'beat' the search engines. While short term gains can be made by various techniques, in the medium to long term the best ways to increase your search engine performance are to provide a well ordered, interesting website (click here to make a more user-friendly website, and to engage in genuine internet marketing, such as being active on forums, writing articles and press releases and generally being active in your field. So it's good news for those of us who engage in natural search engine optimisation, such as us at Semantic SEO, and bad news for those who think that cheap tricks can make a bad website successful.Click here for more SEO articles.

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