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Once Upon a Time
In the beginning, man created the Internet. Man created search engines to present content on the Internet to users, and the potential was there for everything to run smoothly. But sites found that if they didn’t appear near the top of search results, they weren’t getting the traffic they wanted. Jealous publishers began to eat of forbidden fruit in their lust for high rankings. They started tricking the search engines into ranking them, and search engines and Internet users reacted angrily. Search engines built robots to travel far and wide on the Internet and report back on what they found.

Unscrupulous specialists went to war with the robots, devising ever more ingenious means of getting onto results pages through the back door, but eventually these SEO Experts in black hats were defeated. All but a few of them disappeared from the Earth. They had found they were no match for the mighty search engines, with their constant development and relentless dedication to providing users with relevant results. The robots won the war.

What came about was a situation whereby sites had to earn the respect of search engines before being listed, and thus white hat SEO was born. White hat SEO consultants entered the world of the Internet to help sites get the rankings they need, and theirs was a difficult task as the rules of the game kept changing. Never again would the search engines allow black hat SEO to succeed.

In this short piece we’ll examine the evolution of SEO, from its beginnings to the modern, professional SEO services that we use today.

The SEO of the Past
As we attempted to convey in our little introductory story, SEO was born of a desire to get sites onto results pages. While it seems natural to us to give search engines due respect these days, that wasn’t always the way people operated. In the early days of search engines when the possibilities of the Internet were exploding around us, there seemed almost to be no rules. It came to be presumed that if you weren’t playing the system you were losing out to sites that were. Thus SEO, in its early stages, was about getting one up on the competition and appearing on results pages at any cost.

Methods popular at that time included disguising websites by filling pages with keywords that weren’t actually relevant to the actual content of the site. It was this ‘cloaking’ that led to the phenomenon whereby any search at all, even one for ‘ice cream Sundays’ could present users with sites offering gambling services or worse. This led to an awful situation whereby the Internet gained a reputation as being unsafe.

The SEO of Today
These days, SEO is very different. There are now very few SEO consultants who would advocate the unethical methods that now belong in the past. If nothing else, this is for the very simple reason that those methods no longer work. The Internet is no longer in its infancy, and users expect a lot better than to be directed to useless, irrelevant sites. They expect search engines to filter the junk from the Internet and that’s precisely what they do. In ever more sophisticated ways search engines develop their algorithms and their software so that sites that get listed deserve to be there. These days your search for ice cream Sundays should take you directly to your sweet desserts.

SEO today is involved in ways to enhance sites according to the guidelines laid down by search engines and the best estimates of how they actually work. Instead of getting sites in through the back door, modern SEO is concerned with the best ways of opening the front door as fast as possible.

The Future of SEO
The place in history where we find ourselves today is very interesting. Social Media is taking over the world and computing seems always to be on the cusp of a new and revolutionary trend. Times are changing and SEO is changing with them. In the last few years online reputation management has come to play a phenomenal role is search engine optimisation. The necessity for a social media campaign has emerged, as social media optimisation has become a valuable service in itself.

SEO will continue to change for the better and to adapt. As long as there are search engines there will be experts to help guide sites onto their results pages.

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