To put things into perspective let’s look at the very beginnings of SEO. For the most part, search engine optimization started back in 1995 when the web was first really being used as a way to promote business and help make sales. Back then, most websites were not much more than online brochures and animated GIF’s were considered cutting edge technology.
Google was still years away from development and the biggest search engine was not a search engine at all. It was a directory called, “Yahoo!”, invented by two college students (Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994) who basically just compiled a great big bunch of links to their favorite websites and made the list searchable.
When Yahoo! was incorporated and released to the masses in 1995, search engine optimization (more commonly known as SEO) was not far behind. Of course, back then it was called “website optimization,” but that’s another story.
From 1995 to 1997, Yahoo! was the unchallenged champion of the business search world while AOL Search was one of the biggest players in the consumer market. Why? Because seventy percent of the home user market was on AOL’s dial-up Internet service and the default homepage was AOL.com with its (then ground-breaking) simple search box.
Speaking of ground-breaking… In 1996, while attending Stanford University as Ph. D candidates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin collaborated on a search engine called BackRub. The company started picking up traction in 1997 and Page/Brin decided that their search engine needed a new name; Google. Things really took off in August 1998 after Andy Bechtolsheim (co-founder of Sun Microsystems) dropped $100,000 in venture funds into this project. This was about the time Microsoft threw its hat into the ring with MSN Live Search.
One of the most important things to remember about this timeframe was that it was the very beginning of search engine competition and bigger was always considered better. Search engines like Google and directories like Yahoo! were judged more by the number of web pages they had in their catalog than by the quality of search. This was back when there were hundreds of thousands and, by 1998, millions of pages on the web. Any page was a novelty and coveted by all search engines.
SEO during these days was a pretty simple affair, but we will get into that soon enough.