Search engine optimisation: the background
Search engine optimisation emerged as a discipline in the mid 1990s, and allowed us to later make the leap from being a leading web design company to one of the fastest growing digital agencies in Europe. Here’s a little SEO background if you’re interested in how it all started.
The history of SEO
Webmasters began to optimise content for early search engines such as Aliweb, Lycos and AltaVista during the mid 1990s. Back then, search engines relied heavily on metadata embedded in each page’s HTML code. People soon realised that they could get better search engine rankings if they packed meta data with popular or misleading keywords.
That was great for webmasters, but less good for people who wanted to use search engines to find useful content. Search engines quickly began to consider many other factors when ranking websites, but the biggest development occurred in 1998 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google. This new search engine relied on factors such as inward-bound hyperlinks as well as site content, keywords and key-phrases in text, meta data, page titles and site structure.
The new approach set the standard for other search engines and threw up new challenges for SEO. Today, Google reputedly relies on some 200 factors when ranking a page.
Black Hat, White Hat, Grey Hat
No, this isn’t a line from one of Dr Zeuss’s books, but about different approaches to search engine optimisation. The metaphor is almost certainly drawn from black and white magic, and the SEO practices you rely on will determine the type of hat you wear.
White hat, or ethical SEO, is the kind practised by Coast Digital. The search engine optimisation we do is strictly within the guidelines provided by the search engines themselves. Our work produces long term results, and produces steady — and frequently impressive — returns on ROI.
Black hat SEO is all about using techniques banned by the search engines to artificially boost a site’s search engine ranking. Techniques include ‘spamdexing’, an umbrella term for keyword stuffing, adding misleading text that is visible to search engines and invisible to humans, keyword-rich ‘gateway’ pages that add little or nothing to user experience, and creating ‘link farms’ – communities of sites that link exclusively to each other – in the hope that their search engine rank is boosted. Black hat SEO, when successful, tends to produce very short term results before search engines remove the websites in question from their indexes.
Grey hat SEO tactics also aim for long term results, but practitioners dabble in various dubious practices to achieve their aims. These often backfire.
If you want long term SEO results and a measurable return on your investment, you need effective, ethical, white hat techniques like those offered by Coast Digital. To find out more, please contact us.
